An awkward Anglepoise is shining straight at the side of Bridie Moore’s face. She doesn’t like it, the light’s going in her eye. I twist the lamp’s head and raise it so that it illuminates the wall and sends a gentler glow into her bedroom. She’s sitting up in bed against a mound of pillows. She hasn’t felt very well today, Terry Shaw has informed me. I mustn’t stay long. It’s so quiet that the room itself, the carpet and drawn curtains, seem to be breathing.

The silk is crushed in the embrace of my hands. I hold it to my face and breathe in, close my eyes and feel my way over the fabric. Here is a darn, and here and here. The mends are finer than my own fingerprints, each one a scar almost healed. I can believe that if they’re left long enough, the new threads will merge indistinguishably with the old.

I put the edge of the scarf into Bridie’s hand. Her eyes are sharp. She’s already understood. She can’t rub it between fingers and thumb, that action has been forgotten, but she nods all the same. I only ever caught a glimpse of the scarf, that day on the water in Egypt. But Bridie knew it so well that she recognized the design instantly, the day I brought it to Redwood House. The scarf had disappointed her that day, looking so undamaged and new. Now she feels the repairs. It is, after all, the scarf she remembered. The one that had been full of little holes.

“Somebody must have mended it,” I say. “Before it went in the jumble sale.”

Her eyes widen. Obviously.

She had listened while I spoke to Philip. A desultory, inconsequential conversation at the end of a party. My late wife, she heard, and Alexandria, and Yvette. And she was galvanized into a mighty groan.

She tried to tell me, the only way she knew how.

“So Yvette came to your house?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Bridie sighs, rocks her head back. Working out how to explain. In the end she lifts her hand, points to a picture on the wall. I get up to look at it. A watercolor of an infant. Gerard, it says underneath. And there is a date, and before the date, a sign of the cross.

“Oh, Bridie. I’m so sorry.”

—

An indeterminate amount of time has passed. Bridie has made no sound. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed now.

“She told me she’d found someone to talk to. And that was all. She never told me who. Not that I blame her. I couldn’t speak about it. About . . .” I close my eyes for a moment, as whiteness flares on the insides of my eyelids. “I couldn’t help Yvette, you see, Bridie. I’ve always regretted that. How badly I let her down.”