After a while I turned to face him. He was definitely asleep. There was nothing fake about that slackened mouth, or the strand of saliva crusting on the pillow. Even from my side of the bed I could smell stale wine on his breath.

I lay flat on my back again and tried not to make the mattress shake. At least there weren’t any paintings up there, but I wished the ceiling would stop moving. Every time my eyes began to close it seemed to jolt a little closer, like a trap that had been set to crush me in my sleep.

Somebody is at her side in this incurable darkness. It’s him. Diana hears her son’s voice and feels his dry hand on her forehead. Does he sound sad? She thinks he does, even though he’s only murmuring about the weather; about how cool and autumnal it’s become. She tries to beg him to stay, but while she was sleeping her mouth forgot how to shape words. The memory hasn’t disappeared for good—she can feel it unfurling in her brain—but it’s so slow, and he’s gone before it’s ready.

“Cory!” she croaks, at last, into the void. “Stay!”

Diana had won him back with a birthday present. It’s almost funny to recall how anxiously she hovered outside his bedroom with the parcel in her hands, working up the courage to knock. What if he gave her that hating look? Or stood there with open cuts on his arms? Or resented the idea of turning fourteen?

What if he didn’t open the door at all?

It was only midmorning, and a Saturday, so perhaps she should leave him to sleep. Diana lowered her knuckles, but Cory opened the door anyway; he must have heard her loitering. In those days—in the first year of her widowhood—her son’s body seemed to have become smaller and skinnier, while his facial expressions had become entirely adult. There was no denying—try as she might—that he had a look of his father.

“I didn’t know what to buy,” she said shyly, holding out the present. “You always used to like art, so I thought . . .”

Cory took it into his room and sat on the floor to unwrap it. A dozen drawing pencils, needle sharp, in a tin; also a sketchbook, an eraser, and two books called How to Draw People and How to Draw Animals. There was a time she might have caught his eye with a wink and whispered, “Don’t tell your dad,” but that sort of quip seemed riskier than ever now Mr. Byrne was dead.

Mr. Byrne thought art was wet, especially for a boy. He would have bought his fourteen-year-old a rugby kit, or a macho watch, or a manual on how to be a start-up millionaire.