Chapter 13

CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 2023, FIVE DAYS BEFORE HARRY'S DEATH

"Hello, Harry," I said. "Thanks so much for agreeing to see me on short notice."

"Caroline!" Harry said, hesitating a moment before embracing me in an awkward hug. "Of course, of course, you're always welcome here."

We both knew that had not always been the case. For decades, as Juliette's biographer, I had been petitioning Harry's parents (through Harry, or by letter and email) for access to the house at Longhurst, feeling there were aspects of Juliette's personality, elements of Self-Portrait as Sphinx, that being here would help me decode. Not a chance was the answer I always got, via Harry, apologetically.

"Once my parents have made up their mind about something, or someone...," he would regretfully begin, before trailing off. "And I can't say you made a great first impression at my twenty-first."

In the end, all it took to arrange a visit was one of the Willoughbys having something to gain financially from saying yes.

The painting itself was already in Dubai with Patrick, but I wanted to hear from Harry's own lips how and where he had found it. Nor was that all I wanted to investigate at Longhurst Hall.

"Well, Harry's in the process of selling the place," Patrick had advised. "So it may well be your last and only chance to visit before it changes hands."

I had seen the estate agent's listing online, so I knew that the house was in a bad way. What I had not been prepared for was the state Harry himself was in. He looked not only much older than I was expecting, but a lot less well. In my mind, he was forever fixed the way he had looked at university: flushed, cherubic, with buttery curls. Now his frame was angular and slight, his hair reduced to fluffy duckling tufts around the temples. He was wearing a shirt that might once have fitted but was now several sizes too big, with red corduroy trousers worn shiny at the knees and bunched at the waist with an ancient cracked leather belt.

Admittedly, it had been a long time since we last met. Harry had been at our wedding, and a few times the three of us had been out for dinner, usually somewhere stuffy and expensive, at Harry's suggestion, although somehow Patrick always picked up the bill—Harry never seemed to have the right wallet with him or the right credit card. Since then, I had caught Harry on TV too, interviewed in the lobby of the House of Commons, or sent out to defend the government's position on Newsnight. For a Cambridge graduate with such lofty political ambitions, his career had been surprisingly unspectacular, marred by the MP's expenses scandal and the discovery that he had claimed tens of thousands in taxpayer money for repairs at Longhurst. Shortly after the scandal broke in the newspapers, Harry announced his decision not to contest his seat at the upcoming election.

"It's freezing," he blustered, waving me in off the doorstep. "Come in out of the cold."

It was actually far colder inside the house, the kind of chill you get in a building in which the heat has not been turned on for a very long time.

"Can I offer you a cup of tea? Something stronger...?" he asked.

I said I would take a tea. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Although from the way he was stumbling and shuffling, the sudden odd lurches a step or two sideways, I did wonder if Harry had attempted to warm himself up with a nip of something already.

He led me to a sitting room, where he had promised a fire was burning. This turned out to be an enormous hearth with a single smoldering log. There was a plastic kettle on a trolley in the corner, which he filled from a battered Evian bottle. He opened the window to grab a pint of milk from the ledge and I realized that I was standing in exactly the room where Harry's grandmother and father had been when she demanded Self-Portrait as Sphinx be found and burned.

"It's not the ideal setup for receiving guests. But I've accepted an offer on the house and there is a lot to pack up and clear out, so I'm living in just a few rooms. I've been sleeping in the east wing, the oldest part of the house. The walls are thicker, so it's slightly warmer."

This room remained an extraordinary space, even half empty—elaborate but injured plasterwork ceiling (chipped cherubs, denuded fruit baskets), overlapping moth-eaten rugs, and a dusty chandelier. On top of a grand piano were family photos. While he busied himself with the tea bags, I picked up a silver frame. The picture showed Harry and his parents, smiling stiffly in front of a Christmas tree.

"My mother passed away last year. I'm not sure if you heard? Father died a few years ago," Harry said, handing me a steaming mug. I pretended not to notice the way his hand quivered.

"I had no idea. I'm so sorry for your loss," I said.

"Thank you. At least they'll never know if I end up losing this place because of the inheritance tax. Millions, the taxman wants. Millions! Outrageous."

He glanced around as if to underline the absurdity of it all. I tried to look as sympathetic as I could.

"Anyway, they both lived long and full lives, so at least that's something," Harry said, and it struck me how many people associated with this house hadn't. Juliette and Lucy dying so young, Jane Herries and Freddie Talbot simply vanishing.

Occasionally, when I gave a talk on Juliette, someone at the end would ask whether I believed in the Willoughby curse. My answer was always no. Definitely not. What I could understand was why, faced with so much tragedy, people might feel a strange comfort in the idea that there was at least some organizing logic behind it all.

"Is that from the night of your party?" I gestured toward a photo of Harry in a lineup of fresh-faced, dressed-up young men on Longhurst's terrace. Harry nodded.

"All the members of Osiris. Ivo Strang. Benjy Taylor. Arno von Westernhagen. Eric Lam. And Freddie, of course. That's how I always picture him still: in white tie, sipping champagne. Poor Freddie. For years I think we all expected him to come sauntering back into our lives one day. That's why he has never been legally declared dead, you know, why there has never been any sort of official memorial service, because nobody in the family ever wanted to admit the obvious. And then you realize ten years have passed, twenty..."

I remembered Athena's tear-stained face when she told me he had vanished. Over and over I had replayed that morning, my clumsy attempts to reassure her, too distracted to apologize properly. Often in the past thirty years I had tried to imagine what more I might have done in the weeks after to stop her from pushing me away.

Harry and I both fell silent for a moment.

"Anyway," he said eventually. "That's not why you're here. Did you have anything specifically you wanted to know about the painting?"

I nodded. "Can I ask where you found it? Patrick said you were clearing out one of the bedrooms?"

Patrick's name felt a little odd in my mouth, and I realized I had been putting off saying it. Even now, I was never entirely sure how much his old friends knew about how our marriage had ended, how they would respond to seeing me, what they had heard and from whom.

It is hard to explain exactly how a partnership implodes, but I have sometimes wondered if the issue was not us but marriage itself—or at least the wedding. Because up until then, he and I had been two people who loved each other, trying every day to make each other happy. Then suddenly we were planning a Big Day and all these other people were involved, with their own expectations. For the first time, I saw how much Patrick had internalized his father's little snobberies, how much it mattered to Patrick to impress him. I'll never forget the look Patrick gave me when I suggested, in front of his dad, that we might have cava instead of champagne. The unshakable opinions Patrick suddenly seemed to hold on cutlery-related matters, whether the cheese course was served before or after dessert. Which might have been fine if he was the one doing all the organizing, but of course he wasn't. I had a book to write, and plenty of other things to do, and for me the wedding felt like admin for a job I had never applied for—especially since the only person coming from my side of the family was my grandmother, and at every stage of the planning process someone would ask me about my parents.

I hoped that after the wedding, we could get back to the way we had been, but somehow, on some level, we never seemed to. The older we got, the more different we grew, and the less either of us felt like those two people who had fallen in love with each other.

Fortunately, Harry did not seem inclined to ask anything much on the topic of my divorce at all. It was very much the painting he was focused on.

"I was clearing out the Green Room," he said. "And it was in a cupboard, along with a whole load of other paintings. Basically every time it rains this house is like a bloody colander. So over time all the good furniture, all the paintings, migrated into fewer and fewer rooms, into wardrobes and cupboards, for safety. I can show you exactly where I found it, if you like?"

As he led me upstairs and through the house, all sorts of memories seemed to rise and swirl. Some of the rooms and corridors and objects I vividly remembered. Others I had forgotten completely.

Despite it being barely midday, it was almost completely dark once we got away from the end of the house Harry was living in, all the curtains drawn, all the shutters closed. Harry stopped and opened a door. We were at once assailed with a smell of damp and mold.

"The wardrobe I found the painting in was over there," he said, pointing to a space by the fireplace, where its outline could still be seen on the faded botanical-print wallpaper.

"You recognized it at once?" I asked, before realizing with a wince how patronizing that sounded.

"Well, yes," he said, bristling ever so slightly. "It is quite a famous painting, thanks to you, Professor Cooper."

"Something I have been wondering about is why the first person you contacted was Patrick, not a big auction house or a Mayfair gallery?" I asked.

We exited the room and Harry invited me with a gesture to make my way back down the hall. "Sentimentality, I suppose. I trust Patrick, like my father trusted his father. It was also part practicality—auction houses don't work at speed, and I really need this sale to happen quickly."

"By the end of the month, Patrick said. Do you mind my asking why?"

"Not at all. Although I expect you can probably guess. That's when I'm meant to exchange contracts on this place, the point of no return. But if the painting is worth what Patrick says it is, I won't have to be the Willoughby who loses Longhurst, will I?" he said with a sigh. "I might even be able to stop the bloody place falling down around my ears..."

He turned to me, fixing me with a beady eye. "What do you reckon, by the way, about the value of the thing?"

"What a painting is worth has never been my area, I'm afraid. My part in the process is solely to reach a conclusion about whether or not it is really by Juliette," I explained. The trouble was, we already had a Self-Portrait with Sphinx on public display in a national institution. Any minute now I was expecting a call from Tate Modern, asking me what this all meant, or from my publisher, concerned that the painting on the cover of five million books was a fake. Which would make me something of a fake, too, I supposed. And the one thing I couldn't tell any of them—and Patrick swore he hadn't ever so much as hinted to Harry—was that a large part of my confidence in that work's authenticity had always come from the fact that I had originally stolen it myself, from this very house.

"But since my painting was actually found at Longhurst..." Harry looked at me expectantly.

I said nothing. I had no way of explaining how even one copy of the work had survived the fire in Paris, let alone two.

What prevented me from dismissing this new painting as something a desperate Harry had commissioned from a forger was that it was clear from the photos Patrick emailed me that his wasn't a straightforward copy. Forgers did not introduce their own artistic flourishes into the work they were imitating, and Harry's painting undoubtedly differed from the accepted original. The other problem was that since these were all small details we were talking about, unreadable in the murky image from the Witt Library, it was impossible to tell which of the two paintings had been photographed here in 1961.

"What I need to unpack are the differences between the works, and what that might mean," I told Harry. "Whether they might hold some clue as to which is authentic or what the relationship between them is. As far as I can see, there are two significant differences: first, in the bottom right of both paintings, there is an image of a hooded boatman, steering a vessel across dark waters to an island."

It was an image that vividly echoed the boat and robed figure in the papyrus I had seen in the Osiris society's collection of Egyptiana, that ripped fragment from which the head was missing. Which was one of those odd echoes I had spent years pondering, a strange connection between Cyril's collection of Egyptian artifacts and his daughter's lost masterpiece.

"In the version of Self-Portrait as Sphinx on display at Tate Modern, the boatman is just a hooded figure, faceless. In this version, he has a beak."

"A beak? Like a bird?" Harry asked.

"Like an Egyptian god," I replied.

Indeed, as far as I could see, the two differing details in the newly discovered work amplified the painting's Egyptian, mythological resonances, suggesting the possibility of the sort of symbolic reading that had always eluded me. What that might mean in terms of its authenticity, I could not yet be sure.

"So what's the second difference?" asked Harry.

"The second difference is that where in the Tate version of the painting, there is just a barren landscape in the bottom left, in yours there is something written in hieroglyphics. An eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, a hawk."

Harry asked me what it meant.

"I'm afraid I don't read hieroglyphics, but a colleague has promised to take a look at it," I told him.

The phrase had looked strangely familiar, though, which was one of the reasons I was here.

We were passing the turn on the staircase, near the entrance to the east wing with the heavy oak door, the very door through which I had slipped thirty years ago to find the painting. I stopped and rested one hand on Harry's arm and pointed up at the lintel with the other. I felt a little leap in my stomach. Just as I remembered, in gilt lettering over the doorway was the same sequence of hieroglyphics: an eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, and a hawk.

"Do you see?" I asked Harry.

Harry grunted, nodded, rubbed his chin. He was clearly thinking about something.

"There's something else you ought to see," he said.

WHAT HARRY WANTED TO show me involved us rowing over to the island. I did have some safety concerns about this. Not to do with the boat, which looked reasonably seaworthy. Not even because this was the lake in which Lucy had drowned. Mostly because the more time he and I spent together, the more worried I was about him. He was tuning in and out of our conversation with alarming frequency, several times asking me the exact same question twice in quick succession. On our way down to the lake, he found it hard to stick to the curving path of mossy cobbles. But I could not smell alcohol on him, nor once the old wooden boat was in the water did he struggle to steer us in the right direction, or keep his oars in sync. He leaned forward, he pulled back, and over the otherwise undisturbed water we skimmed.

On the island, all that remained of what had once been a jetty were three rotten wood stumps. We pulled the boat up onto the pebbles of a little beach and placed the oars in the hull. Harry brought a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and dabbed his brow. The path was almost entirely overgrown. We picked our way down it, Harry in the lead, pausing occasionally to gently lift a thorny branch out of the way or kick at a clump of nettles. After a while we reached the pyramid. The tomb which, in a tragic twist of events, Cyril's beloved elder daughter, Lucy, had been the first to occupy, and in which Cyril too was later laid to rest, although his wife had insisted on being buried in the consecrated Church of England cemetery in the village instead.

Harry, out of breath, stood for a minute with his hands on his thighs. Then, with a glance back at me, he pointed up at what was carved into the entrance to the tomb: an eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, and a hawk.

PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, FOUR DAYS BEFORE HARRY'S DEATH

Late evening has always been my favorite time in Dubai. Sitting out on our villa's terrace after dinner as the heat dies down, a gin and tonic in hand, a warm breeze rattling the date palms, a swallow occasionally dipping and diving and ruffling the surface of the swimming pool.

"Would you swap all this for a flat in Islington?" Sarah sometimes asks me.

"I wouldn't swap it for a house in Mayfair," I always reply.

The pollution. The crime. The weather. You almost forget here, opening the curtains on yet another day of sun, what rainy England is like, everyone sneezing on the tube, those November days it barely gets light at all.

It was not the weather that drew me here, though.

Sarah and I met at a dinner during Art Dubai three years ago—I spoke to the attractive Australian woman sitting next to me about the elaborate table decorations; she turned out to have designed them. We got talking. She had lived here for a decade and really sold the place to me. She was amazed—she thought I was joking—when I told her that this was my third visit and I had barely ventured beyond the art fair. I should get out into the desert, she told me. Camp under the stars. Go sailing. How long was I in town for?

I was here for a week and I ended up doing something with Sarah every day that I had never done in my life before. Scuba diving. Dune bashing. Waterskiing. She was the kind of person, she said, who believed you always had to keep trying new things. Being with her made me feel I could be that sort of person too. I was certainly sick of the man I had become, drinking too much, smoking too much, dwelling on the past.

When I was with Sarah I felt younger, and more optimistic than I had in years. It was not until my last night in Dubai that we slept together. A month later I was back again. Three weeks after that, she came to stay with me in London. It was bad timing—the boiler in my flat was acting up, the rent on my Dover Street gallery had just been hiked for the third time in as many years, and on the plane Sarah picked up (and then gave me) an absolutely stinking cold.

All the time she was there, she kept telling me how exciting the art scene was in Dubai, what a fabulous time it would be to move there. Why not get away from all this? Why not start afresh? I proposed at Heathrow Airport. She said yes immediately, eyes damp, visibly delighted I was down on one knee with an antique diamond ring next to the check-in. I was intoxicated by the joyful ease of the entire thing.

Within the year, I had sold my gallery in London and moved. To launch a new gallery. To begin a new life.

There were times when it felt like that might have been a bit hasty. As it turns out, you could get bored of sunsets. You could get tired of the beach. You could get sick of constantly having to project success, exude confidence, muster up charm. You could start to wonder whether you were actually deluding yourself, questioning if it had actually been a smart move to sell everything you owned back home to set up a new business in the UAE, a country in which you knew precisely one person. You could, in your darker moments, start to feel a creeping doubt about whether that one person was in fact the right one person for you.

"You're having a midlife crisis," was Caroline's only comment when I told her I was emigrating. I put this down to jealousy at the time. In retrospect, she may have been right.

It was a gamble, the move, the new gallery, the loans I had taken out to do both, and I was losing. Unless Harry's sale came off, unless I could persuade Caroline and she could help me persuade the world that Harry's painting was authentic, and we could find someone to buy it, I would be bankrupt in weeks. I would lose the business. I would lose this house. Nor was that the worst of it.

"Does she understand?" Sarah kept asking me, "Have you told her what happens when you go bankrupt here? She can't wish that on you, can she?"

It would not help, I said, putting pressure on Caroline, trying to influence her professional judgment. You couldn't pay most academics for their involvement in authenticating works for that very reason—they were terrified of being accused of underhanded dealings. Nevertheless, the truth was I was one painting away from bankruptcy in a country in which going bankrupt landed you in prison. Nor was skipping the country an option—I'd be handcuffed at passport control.

I was just thinking about easing myself up off my chair and heading inside for another drink when my phone rang.

Sarah glanced at it. "It's her," she said, an edge to her voice, gesturing for me to answer.

I sat upright and picked up the phone.

"Caroline! How did the trip to Longhurst go?"

"Fine. I mean, Harry looked like a sad ghost, wandering around those halls, and I have concerns about him, health-wise. But the visit was useful. Actually that's why I'm calling. This painting, the pictures you sent. You mentioned two differences between yours and the one in Tate Modern. Have you got yours there with you?"

"I'm afraid not. I'm at home. The painting is in the gallery, where it's safe," I said. Where I had invested in quite a lot of extra security measures, to ensure that it was safe, at no small cost.

"How long would it take you to drive there?"

"At this time of night? Fifteen minutes, probably."

"Patrick. There's a third difference. Between the paintings."

Twenty minutes later, I was climbing out of a cab at the Dubai International Financial Centre. The gallery was locked, of course. It was almost ten o'clock at night. I typed the code into the keypad and closed the door carefully behind me. Caroline had said she would call back in half an hour. I was standing in front of the painting when she did.

"Well?" she asked me.

"I'm not seeing it," I said.

"Look more closely at the bottom right section."

I did so.

"Jesus, you're right," I told her, a fizz of excitement gathering between my shoulder blades. "It's in the boat, isn't it. There's something lying in the boat."

"Exactly, exactly!" She sounded triumphant. "That's what I mean. A white shape. But what is it? I've been sitting here zooming in on your photos, but I can't quite make it out. Can you?"

I held up my phone and turned on its flashlight. Squinting, holding my breath, I leaned in closer, the sharp beam of light illuminating the normally invisible craquelure in the painting's varnish.

I carefully stepped to the side and held my phone up at a different angle.

"I think it's a body," I said. "A body all cross-crossed with bandages. That's what it is, the object in the boat. A mummified body."

JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938

The exhibition ended and with it our dream of escape.

Oskar's painting had not sold, nor in all these weeks had he started on anything new. I could understand that. For as long as I had known him, he had been working on Three Figures in a Landscape, convinced this was his masterpiece, a work that would attract derision and scorn and praise and acclaim, a work that would set the critics searching for superlatives, and buyers scrambling for their checkbooks.

Instead, it had been met with almost total silence. Barely mentioned in most of the reviews. His embarrassment—and mine—only compounded by the fact that in terms of column inches, the painting I had withdrawn from the exhibition was attracting more comment than his, which remained on display.

Embarrassment is perhaps too mild a word. By the third week of February, when the exhibition ended, the situation was excruciating. Every day Oskar would get up in the morning and grimly select one of his unfinished canvases, add a few touches, then return it dejectedly next to the others. Every afternoon he would go for long walks, or find some bar to sulk in. He was out past midnight every night. When he was home, he could hardly bear to look at me, and refused to look at Self-Portrait as Sphinx at all—he turned it around to face the wall, like a naughty child.

I had tried to explain to him my decision to withdraw it from public display. Still, I could not get him to understand why I was so afraid. "What can your family do, even if they find us?" he would ask mockingly. "You are not a minor. This is not England. You are here of your own free will."

It was weeks since I had been outside, and Oskar kept badgering me to leave the apartment. It was for my own good, he insisted. I was still not painting. I was barely eating. Did I really think it was possible for me, for us, to go on like this much longer? Even if my uncle was still in Paris, Oskar pointed out, how did I think he would have found out my address? Oskar reminded me that of all his artist friends, only Breton had ever been here, once, to see our paintings. It was an international exhibition in which our work had been shown, he would repeat, with fourteen countries listed in the catalogue. There was nothing in the catalogue to connect me to Paris. There was nothing in the catalogue to connect Oskar and me. As far as my uncle knew I could be in Spain, Italy, America, Japan.

Eventually, I gave in.

It felt strange to be out in the world among people again. To walk the banks of the Seine, water brightly sparkling. To feel the cold breeze on my face. I kept seeing things and thinking, I must remember to tell Oskar about that.

But when I got back to the apartment, Oskar was gone. And so was my painting.

The rest of the day I sat there, waiting for him to return, trying to distract myself. I started the kettle going and wandered off, confused moments later at the shrill noise coming from the stovetop and the ceiling roiling with steam. I made cups of tea and did not drink them. The light changed. The room grew dim. Dinnertime came and went. It was just before eight when his footsteps fell on the stairs, their uneven clatter making it clear how drunk Oskar was. The ancient banister complained when he put his weight on it. I could hear him muttering to himself as he fumbled his key out of his pocket and began attempting to jam it into the lock. When at last he did manage to get the door open, he came practically tumbling into the room.

When he saw me sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, face stony, it took him a moment to readjust his focus. When he bent forward to kiss me—I did not react—I could smell the stale cigarettes on his breath. His stubble scraped my cheek.

"Before you say anything," he said, holding one hand up, reaching into the pocket of his jacket with the other. He extricated a large brown envelope, turning his pocket lining inside out in the process, and threw it on the kitchen table.

"What is that?" I said, making a point of not looking, a touch of Willoughby hauteur chilling my voice. Some people boil and hiss and pop when they are angry. I freeze. To the casual observer, perhaps even to Oskar, I might have appeared perfectly calm.

"Passports," he said, a sloppy grin spreading across his face. "Our new passports. Train tickets. Boat tickets. All in our new names. This is what you wanted, isn't it? A clean break with the past? A new start in the new world?"

Our ship was due to sail from Le Havre the following afternoon. There was a moment when the future seemed to open up brightly before the two of us. New lives. Then I asked him how he paid for all this. What had happened to my painting.

He grew furtive. I asked about my painting again and it all came tumbling out. About the gentleman—a real gentleman, Oskar emphasized, English, educated, a serious collector—he had bumped into at the café the other day. Who had sidled over and asked if he was Oskar Erlich. Who had talked to him about his work. Who inquired about his Three Figures in a Landscape and the work displayed next to it, my painting, and why it had been withdrawn. "What could I tell him?" said Oskar. "I said no one knows except the artist herself."

I could feel my nails digging into the softness of my palms, my face growing taut. "An English gentleman?" I said. "You fucking fool."

Oskar sneered, the way he always did when women swore. And then he went that color he did when someone calls him a fool. His fists were flexing, the veins on the back of them standing up. I had never seen him so angry. I looked around for something to ward him off with, if he lost control. There was a fork on the table. There was the little knife Oskar used to scrape paint off old canvases on the corner of the sink.

"A fool, am I?" he said. "A fucking fool?"

As he was saying it, he reached into the inner pocket of the breast of his coat, and when his hand emerged it had another envelope in it. He threw it on the table and it landed with a thump.

"Open it," he said. "Count it."

"You stole my painting," I hissed, shaking my head. "You stole my painting and you sold it."

He told me again to open the second envelope. I refused.

"Tell me his name," I said.

"George Brown," he said in an attempt at an English accent. "His name was George Brown."

Describe him, I demanded. Oskar did so. And with every detail, my heart sank further. The long narrow face. The tidy mustache. The slicked-back blond hair with the comb marks visible. My uncle. He had been drinking all day with my uncle. He had sold my painting for an envelope of cash, to my uncle. I called him a fucking fool again, then I picked up the envelope and threw it, hard, in his face.

That was when he hit me. An open-handed slap with all his strength across my face that left my ears ringing, my jaw numb, and a taste of blood in my mouth. And he kept coming. His eyes blank with fury, he kept coming at me. He swung again and missed, knocking the rickety table across the room. I stumbled backward, up against the sink.

I raised my arms to defend myself, not really thinking about what I was holding, vaguely aware of one of my hands having closed around something on the edge of the sink. He lunged at me again, as if to seize me by the throat, and as he lunged I felt a jolt in my palm. When I looked down, I saw that it was the palette knife I had been holding, intending to wave it at him, to bring him to his senses.

But now it was embedded handle-deep in his chest, the shirt puckered around it, the blood spreading dark and sticky. And for a moment it looked like he was going to laugh, like it was absurd that I had thought this little thing was going to hurt him, like he might pluck it out and cast it across the room and then there would really be trouble.

Instead, even as he was reaching for it, even as he was formulating something to say, his knees went, and he came crashing down onto them, shouldering one of the kitchen chairs aside as he did so. Then he let out a groan. Then he fell forward, knife handle first, onto the floorboards.