Mornings, he thought about running away from running away, but where could he go? He could call his parents, who would give him the address of one of his older sisters, or some cousins—he remembered visiting an elderly person in a house in Kent when he was seven. But nobody was in London. He went out walking for hours, down Notting Hill Gate to Kensington Gardens, across Kensington Gardens to Exhibition Road, down the old Brompton Road. Everyone in London was from somewhere else. A game he invented: he would look at people, guess where they were from, then get close enough to hear them speak. Shoes and hair were the deadest giveaways. Every so often he would see a woman with a particular expression and he would know without analysis that she was American. The thrill of recognition. He would have to follow her until he heard her talk—to her companion, to a clerk in the chemist’s. In the drugstore. He was light-footed and invisible, and on this subject he was always right.

He’d been raised by wolves, then delivered to civilization. Then, at the end of the summer, the wolves came back to claim him.

Early September. In Ithaca, New York, his junior year in high school was about to start, but in London Jack was doing his chores, standing at the ironing board in the living room, the only space big enough to unfold it.

“Jack,” Lottie called from the door to the flat.

He hadn’t seen Fiona for two years, and Eloise for three. The word relations lit up in his head: what Eloise and Fiona were to him; what he and Lottie had, in a euphemism his father might have used. Did you have relations with that revolting woman. His older sisters had come to rescue him. They were grown-ups and had bank accounts. Five minutes before, he believed his problems were complicated, immense, insoluble; now he understood that every one of them could be dismissed with money. He was so delighted he’d forgotten what the situation looked like: Lottie in an emerald-green satin housecoat, he shirtless and smoking a cigarette over his ironing. Not his own shirt but a tiny blue suit for Willie Shavers. Lottie had promised him to Jack: she didn’t like Willie Shavers. You could bend emotion into the cloth puppets; Willie’s expressions were purely mechanical. Anyhow, he’d been a gift from her own mentor, a man named Shappy Marks, long dead and—said Lottie—good riddance. But not yet. Jack would have to earn him.

“Lenny,” said Fiona, and Eloise said, “Lenny, my God, what happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re a bag of bones.”

“This is Eloise,” said Fiona, the kinder one, she was wearing a pink dress with red roses and her hair loose and parted down the middle. “I’m Fiona. Get your things, Len.”