Their whispered argument blended so well with the house that I almost missed it. I stopped just in time, clamping my hands over my mouth to muffle the sound of my own breathing. Diana was doing most of the talking. I couldn’t catch much, but I knew she was upset by the way her voice kept rising in high-pitched spikes.

“Shh,” Cory kept saying. “Shh.”

“Darling, you of all people should see—”

“Oh, don’t give me that!” Cory’s voice was heated. “Since when have you been superstitious?”

“Cory, I’m begging you, I’m ordering you—”

“No. You don’t get to order me anymore.” He struggled to soften his voice. “You’re ill. Stop fretting.”

In shrinking back against the wall, I banged my shoulder against a switch, and a dull light washed along the landing. Diana’s mouth slackened when she saw me, and Cory jumped. His arms were full of rugs and pillows.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I was just, I couldn’t find the light switch.”

One of the pillows fell to the floor, so I picked it up, and Cory deposited the rest of the bedding in my arms.

“My mother’s tired,” he said. “She’s not well. Give me two minutes to get her settled.”

I nodded.

Diana shrank when Cory touched her arm. He glanced at me over her head, his smile a little clownish, as if he were trying to make light of a sad situation. I couldn’t help liking that look, and the tentative way it made an “us” out of him and me.

“Come on,” he said—addressing her but watching me.

I stood with the bundle of bedclothes in my arms as Cory steered his mother away. The further they got from the landing light, the more they seemed to merge with one another, so that by the time they started up the stairs to the third floor they’d become a single creature, hunched and improbable, with four ill-matched legs and two heads.

“Goodnight,” I called as an afterthought, but neither of them seemed to hear me.

“So, your father,” Cory said. “Would that be Robert Lyell? The art critic?”

I’d switched the light on, and my bedroom had become a harsh patchwork of yellow light and black shadow, with no in-between shades. I was unfolding a blanket and Cory was shrugging a pillowcase over a pillow.

“The art critic,” I echoed, struggling to throw the blanket over the bed. “Yes, that’s right, he writes for the London Globe. How did you know?”

Cory shoved awkwardly at the pillow. “I just remember, from when your sister was all over the news.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

I’d been getting on all right with the bed-making until Cory came in and I lost the knack. I couldn’t get the blanket straight, and even when I did I kept fidgeting with it—tucking in corners that were already tucked and smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. I’d started hating my dress as well, the same way I hated my childish suitcase. The dress was cheap and shabby, with its crumples and its ditsy flowers, and every time I bent down it rode up and showed the backs of my knees.