He shakes his head in despair. “I don’t know what on earth’s going on,” he says, raking both hands through his hair. “I’m just trying to lead my life, you know? But now there’s all this . . . stuff, about Mum, and my sister . . .” He turns around and I’m shaken by the look he gives me, one I’ve never seen before, a fully grown adult glare. “And that man. You ought to know that I blame you for that. The way you behaved.”

“Indeed.” At last I feel some mettle. “Philip Moore had nothing to do with it?”

The glare diminishes, but he’s still hot-eyed; he pushes at his fringe. “Yeah, well, obviously a bit.”

“I couldn’t have told you about Philip. Your mother never said a word. I don’t know any more than you. Possibly less than you, if there’s another notebook.” I take my courage in my hands. “Is there another notebook, Tom?”

He says, “Yes, it’s upstairs.”

I shut my eyes and breathe in, my hands flat over my mouth.

“I haven’t read it,” I hear him saying. “I couldn’t, in the end. I thought you should be first.”

He takes my arm. “Come on. This way.” I open my eyes again; he ushers me to the foot of the stairs. “Do I need to, sort of, shunt you up there?”

“I beg you, no shunting.”

“Did you fall off the chair when you got down?” he says as we ascend. “I bet you did. Trust you to try and mend the hole by yourself.”

“Wasn’t mending the hole.” Climbing makes me short of breath.

“What, then?”

I signal that I can’t talk anymore. He shows me the bathroom, points toward another door: “That’s my room,” and goes back downstairs to make tea.

—

The bathroom is medically clean. His room spotless, tidy. Rush matting on the floor, a lowered blind, beanbags. My gaze runs over posters of sweating guitar-harnessed men, snake-haired women, a striking image of a beam of light refracted through a triangular prism. A crammed bookshelf made of planks on bricks. A chest of drawers, on the bare wooden top a circle made out of small pebbles and seashells. Both pebbles and shells are striped with white and a multitude of grays, the stones smooth and seamed with quartz, the shells perfect ribbed fans. They alternate, pebble and shell, touching edge to edge like the beads of a necklace.

In the middle of this circle is the cedarwood chest.

“There she is. Safe with her brother.”

Tom’s standing behind me with two mugs of tea. He nods toward the pebbles and shells. “That was Florence’s idea,” he continues. “So I went with my mates to Holkham and Cromer, to the beaches.”

“Beautiful.”

He shrugs. It is what it is. “Which is better for you? Sitting or lying down?”

“Lying down.”