In her not-seeing, Ferla chose to exonerate herself from any part of Katu’s fate. She talked to her dead father about it. You understand, Father, don’t you? she said. Benni made me. And you understand that sometimes people need to be punished, don’t you? You punished Katu many times. Remember? It was interesting, the way humans could decide not to see the truth when it made them too uncomfortable.

Sometimes Ferla took to flying into rages and breaking things. In the upstairs apartments, lifting ceramic statues, glass candle holders, or entire vases full of water and flowers from the tables, she slammed them against the stones of the hearth. Benni would stand there while she screamed, looking wary and far away in his thoughts. When members of the Devret family came to investigate the noise, he would rouse himself to say that he was terribly sorry, there’d been an accident.

“We dropped it,” Benni would say, or “It slipped” or “It fell.” One of these times, Mara crossed the room with a look of the deepest misgiving, took a portrait of her son, Mari, down from the wall, then carried the portrait away.

The Devrets believed, of course, that the Cavendas were mourning the death of a child. The fox liked to watch Mara and Arni Devret through the grate in their bedroom, where they spent a lot of time talking. Mara knitted in a chair, something pale and soft and blue that grew bigger in her lap every day, and he liked to steal loose pieces of the yarn. The Devrets had a warmth and an affection for each other, even in the midst of stressful houseguests, that the fox had never witnessed before, ever. They talked often about the little boys, who were trapped in grief. In fact, the boys’ anguish for their sister was so uncontrolled, their confusion so inundating, that the fox had taken to avoiding them. Their pain set every hair of his body on edge and made him feel terribly helpless. The Devrets tried to comfort the boys, but the Devrets didn’t understand what their lives had been. And anyway, what comfort was there for a sister gone?

Sometimes the fox watched Mara in her knitting chair when she was alone, tracking her feelings, her thoughts. She cried about her son, Mari, who was grieving Lovisa. Mara would hurt because Mari hurt, trying to think of some way to make him feel better. Deciding that there wasn’t a way to make him feel better, and crying a little about that too. Then heaving a sigh and pushing her mind back to work. Mara was a politician, and her husband a banker. She was clever and cynical and sometimes she was hard. But she contained kindness too, in her thoughts, and toward the people around her. Whenever the fox touched upon her kindness, he poked at it, sniffed it, with something like hunger.