“Not that one!”

For a split-second I was scared, and he was scared, but it was over too quickly to be real.

“Here, look at these,” he said, and I thought he hadn’t grabbed me by the wrist, as such. He’d only touched me to draw my attention to the sketchbook.

I took it from his hands and tried not to glance in the direction of the canvas.

“Oh, yes.” I turned the pages shakily and nodded. “Very nice.”

They were drawings of Byrne Hall as viewed from the garden, and he must have done them in winter because the trees and shrubs were all bare and twisted. It was a different house from the one in my head, but it was also the same.

“So, can I draw you?” he said, when I’d finished looking.

“Yes, if you like.”

I sat down again on the rug, while Cory went round the room gathering pencils and sticks of charcoal.

“Did you study art at college?”

“No. Well, once, but I chucked it in after a couple of terms. Waste of time.” He touched his chest with the flat of his hand. “It’s all in here, isn’t it, if it’s anywhere? Same as you and your poetry.”

I nodded uncertainly and picked a flake of old paint off of one of the floorboards.

“Which art college was it?” I wondered. “Was it in London?”

“Oh.” He shrugged and turned away. “No. You wouldn’t have heard of it, it was . . . Ugh, damn it, I’ve broken another pencil lead. Hang on a minute while I just . . .”

Once he was ready he settled on the rug, with an A3 sketchbook open on his knees.

“Thank goodness for the house,” he said unexpectedly. I didn’t understand; I was still thinking about art schools.

“What house?”

Cory flicked the sketchbook open and ran his palms in slow circles over the clean sheet. The page was yellow in the candlelight—smooth, pure, and inviting. It was like fresh snow at sunrise, when you stand at the back door and look down the garden, loathe to mark it with your footprints yet longing to do exactly that.

“The house,” Cory repeated, as if he’d only just registered my voice. He raised his head and waved one arm loosely in the air. “Byrne Hall. We have to live off weddings, now there’s nothing left to sell.”

I thought he was joking and laughed, but he didn’t join in.

“You sold all the contents?” I said. “Everything?”

“Almost everything.” He shrugged. “It was mostly stuff from my father’s side of the family.”

He seemed transfixed by the empty page, peering at it closely for minutes on end before turning to a new one, as if he’d spotted some flaw. I watched him trace an invisible line with his thumb and wondered what he was picturing. A half-moon, perhaps. The supple trunk of a sapling. The shape of a face, from chin to ear.

“I wish you could see it as it used to be, when I was little,” he said.