HOW I’VE MISSED THEM. Even if I really don’t trust Sherm. And Kit couldn’t wait to get me in the bedroom to rake over Francesca. ‘We were with you through the whole case, Gem. Just couldn’t lay it on you—to call up and condole.’

Not—as I couldn’t help thinking—that they hadn’t wanted the political association, with the parents of a girl who died that way? Or maybe Sherm didn’t.

‘Frankie was never political,’ Kit says. I love her again at once, for saying Frankie.

And for migrating to the kitchen, she and Sherm both—like real friends. And for telling us the worst.

Kit begins at once.

‘That picture—’ she says. ‘Those eighteen-ninetyish kids on the beach. In those wide-banded hats, with shovel and pail. Like a border. I always loved it. But Gem, you shouldn’t keep it so near the stove. Darkens it.’

I know. But these days I want everything in its own place, as first put there. Have to. I never was one to let objects scatter the house—they all hold their places. Now they seem to migrate of themselves—rain boots dropped next to the toilet and left there, cups of old tea on Rupert’s bookcase, and once, on a kitchen shelf, an egg, maybe intended for a cake and poised there and left, while I reached for the rice.

‘Oh well—’ I say. ‘Probably it isn’t a Prendergast. We haven’t any provenance for it.’

Yet I appreciate she said ‘border.’ That’s the way it looks to me. She and I have eyes of the same era.

Maybe that’s why I’m too upset now to write more.