That’s how my afternoons used to be, I thought, before.

Before Joseph came.

MY MORNINGS, with the newspaper, were the same. My interest in the paper was still the small report I would seek, and occasionally find, like a nugget: an explosion on a small road near a power line; a problem, a mysterious problem, or attack, at a police station. Sabotage. Something like that. They weren’t large explosions, they weren’t major installations, they were at smaller power stations, or at smaller mines, in peripheral towns. But it was a beginning. I understood that now.

As I sat on my patio under the leaves which filtered the morning sun, and watched the pool in front of me, spread in promise and beauty, I could feel our days number. It was impossible to forget the man behind the trees, invisible, but there, working, working. I imagined I heard the scratch of his pen, as he wrote, wrote. I did not hear it.

I began to feel Jack Benator would never move Joseph, perhaps there’d never been a serious effort to move him, it was working too well.

Then I started to think I was to blame: to blame for making it work so well, so well that my family was now stuck with Joseph forever. If only I had made more of a fuss, been stronger with Howard. (I was never strong with Howard.) If only I’d insisted on him being moved, by saying it was dangerous for my children. (It was dangerous for my children.) It was surely my fault, as my children’s mother. It was my fault.

I began to feel I should take things — something — into my own hands. Perhaps, I thought, I would finally be strong with Howard.

I would say: Howard, this is it. We never asked to harbour a fugitive, you did Jack a favour. I know we believe in his work, but it’s enough, we’ve done enough. It is not safe for the children, or for us. You know it. I’m telling you now: have Joseph moved.

How I repeated that conversation, that rebellion of mine, in my mind. Like a tape on repeat, it went on and on, the same, the same words, circling in my mind, saying them emphatically to Howard. I imagined saying them in our room, as we were going to bed, I under my lamp, with my book. I imagined Howard’s distracted face, as I said them.

But I never said the words aloud, or I never said them quite the way I imagined saying them, or with quite the emphasis, or with quite the . . . courage. Did I lack courage? Did I lack energy? Did I always lack those things?

My fault, my fault, again.

EMILY CAME ONE DAY with news of Tiny. It wasn’t much news. Tiny had visited her children again. Tiny had a different job now, she said, and a different boyfriend. But Tiny was alive, alive. Those were Emily’s words, Emily’s word: alive. Emily shook her head as she told me. I had decided, long before, that I wasn’t going to hire another maid to replace Tiny, not ever. My mother said to me several times, on the phone, have you got a new maid yet? You need one. The children. The laundry.