I looked into the mirror, beyond my own face. Diana was restless today. Sometimes she whimpered in her sleep; more than once I caught the glint of an open eye. Cory sat alongside her with his feet on the bed, leafing through the thick address book.

“The Bayley-Manninghams,” he read. “I remember them; they always used to come and stay with us round Easter time . . . Jack and Loretta Cunningham—you’ve crossed Loretta out though, Mother, so does that mean she died? Or—no, she divorced him, didn’t she? . . . Archie Lamott . . . Olivia something-or-other, can’t read your writing . . . Charles Pemberton. I remember him. He was supposed to have had a Picasso in his downstairs loo.”

The bedsheets rustled as Cory crossed his ankles, and a makeshift peace descended on the room. All day long he’d been finding excuses to touch me: little kisses on my neck, pinches on my earlobes, fingers down my spine. “I’m only being affectionate,” he would say defensively when I froze. “I only love you, Freya.” If he was testing my reflexes, he wasn’t going to admit it, and neither was I. “Ditto,” I kept saying, smiling my frigid smile.

Now he was engrossed in the old address book, and my attention was allowed to wander over the faded pictures and photos on the wall. The Gainsborough College photo was irresistible, but I only dared a flicker of a glance, and even that made my cheeks burn. I took a fresh card from the pile, dipped the pen, and began to write. The D of Dear wobbled badly, and I had to scrap the card and start over. I could feel Cory’s eyes on my neck and I clogged the nib with too much ink, which meant I wrecked another.

“Maybe you should do the lettering in pencil first?” he suggested, getting up from the bed. “Go over it in black afterward?”

He leaned over my shoulder and rested his cheek against mine. Obediently, I reached for a pencil and sharpened it, and the clean smell of the shavings made me think of home, and Tom, and my exercise books with their old, useless poems.

The ghosts cluster in dark places—behind the door, on top of the wardrobe, in undusted corners—and swell into bright focus when Diana’s pain is at its most exquisite. As the spasm fades, so do the faces and voices of the dead.

Most of these old shadows leave Diana unfazed. After all, she’s known them—half glimpsed and half heard them, anyway—for years. She could bear them all—even her bloated and fish-nibbled husband—if it weren’t for the red-haired girl. Stella’s ghost looks more real than the others, and she’s always hanging around Cory as if she has a claim on him. She seems more subdued than she used to be, but no less malevolent for that.