Many of the downstairs doors were locked, and I couldn’t see through the keyholes because they were clogged with dust. It was the same upstairs. The rooms I did manage to enter were as godforsaken as Sleeping Beauty’s castle—that’s if the castle had been burgled during its hundred-year trance, stripped of everything except a few dreary oddments. A clotheshorse, a baize card table, a mouldy roll of carpet, a heap of dirty magazines from the eighties, a tray crammed with sticky, dusty, half-finished liqueurs.

Every now and then I risked calling his name, but by the time I reached the foot of the stairs to the third floor, my voice had sunk to an urgent whisper. I found myself gritting my teeth as I set foot on the first step.

Cory was sitting on the stairs, and he stared at me vacantly when I rounded the corner.

“You’re here!” I cried. “I couldn’t understand where you’d got to, and I wanted to find you and talk to you, and I was calling and calling . . .”

I gabbled on, but Cory’s mind was elsewhere. When I knelt on the stair below him and peered into his face, I smelled alcohol on his breath.

“Something terrible has happened,” he said.

“What? What’s happened?”

He hiccupped softly.

“I’m going to miss you when you go back,” he said, slipping sideways past my question. “I’m going to miss you so much; I think it’s going to drive me to drink.” And he laughed strangely.

“Cory . . .” I hadn’t seen him in this mood before; I wished he’d look me in the eye. “What did you mean when you said something terrible has happened?”

“I’m going to miss you so much.”

I stroked his back, shushed him, and wondered what I’d done to make myself indispensable. His head felt heavy on my shoulder, as if he had the stemlike neck of a newborn, incapable of supporting its own weight.

I kept whispering and hushing in his ear, and he raised his head and held my face in his hands. Perhaps I’d been wrong and he wasn’t drunk after all. He didn’t look it or sound it anymore; not when he stroked my face and said, “I love you.”

Neither of us had ever said that before. It’s a tricky phrase to say with conviction—it has a habit of sounding overweighted, or trite, or simpering—but Cory’s effort was a triumph.