For the second time I call his number. Once again Ade, or Jase, informs me that Tom is out. “He really is out this time,” he adds, which tells me all I need to know.

Wait. Perhaps there is still another place to look. I packed up so haphazardly, I can’t even remember how many boxes I filled. Tom might not have got them all down from the attic. The creaks had scared him: maybe he was too hasty. The end of the story might be up there, above my head, waiting to be unpacked.

I fetch Tom’s table and chair out onto the landing, set the chair on the table, and climb up to the hatch. This time, as I haul myself into the attic, I manage to kick the chair off the table. Too bad. I’ll just have to jump down.

One star is visible through the fissure in the roof, but no light floods in. The night is moonless. No matter. I can see enough. Is that a pile of boxes there in the middle of the floor? Or is it the fallen tiles? As I approach the uncertain shape it assumes an odd flatness, like a large water stain.

I step forward and my foot plunges down into nothing.

—

It happens so fast that I don’t even cry out. I make a grab at the darkness, get a purchase on a splintered beam, nearly wrench my arm out of its socket. Immediately the pain in my shoulder becomes so agonizing that I let go and drop down onto my bedroom floor. I land heavily and pitch forward onto the shattered roof tiles. They must have made the hole, weighing the rotten planking down until it gave way.

“Jesus Christ!” I bellow, brought to profanity by the pain in my shoulder and my knees.

Above me, as if in response, comes a colossal bang, a knock of doom. Then another and another, each one following more quickly on the heels of the last.

What did they use to say in air raids? In the event of a direct hit, an iron bedstead offers the best shelter. Best get under the bed.

Quick, get under—get under the bed—

NINETEEN

I did not know about the appreciation of beauty.

I did not know that if the body is in immense pain the mind can still revel in the morning light. The slowness with which it builds in the north. Its clarity in winter.

All those separate aspects of the light, slow, winter, morning, enchanting me as individual nails of pain are hammered into different sites of my body.

The snow looms into visibility as the light builds. Creamy, gorgeous. Edible. Many things remind us of food.