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cause and a lost one.”
    “OK, some other investor, then.”
    “Yes, they’re thick on the ground these days. Queuing up round the block to throw money down a pit, last time I looked.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie, stop being so negative. I know you don’t want to live here and I’m not even suggesting that that would be necessary. But your son might want to one day. Have you considered that?”
    He might have been more shocked at this blow beneath the belthad he not realized, to his shame, that he hadn’t considered his son’s views at all. Not once, not for a moment. He might as well not have had a son.
    “Don’t bring Luke into this.”
    “Why not? Maisie is part of this too. Hugo and Reggie must have trusted us to look after the house for future generations or they wouldn’t have left it to us.”
    He ran the tap, poured himself a glass of water, drank half of it, set it down. “We don’t know what their reasons were. That will was drawn up years ago, before Luke and Maisie were even born. Things were different then.”
    The kitchen clock ticked. It was nearly midnight.
    Charlie drank the rest of the water. “OK,” he said, “for the sake of argument, let’s say Hugo and Reggie did trust us to look after the house. But looking after the house means making the right decision about its future. As things stand, we can either keep it or we can save it. We can’t do both. If we try to hang on to it, we’ll lose it sooner or later. The only way this house is going to survive in anything like its present form is if we sell it to somebody who has enough money to look after it properly.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “I’m being realistic.”
    “Is that what you call it?”
    “For fuck’s sake,” said Charlie, gesturing to the piles of papers on the kitchen table, “look at all this stuff you’ve been digging up. All this stuff Hugo collected. What does it tell you? This house has never stood still. Not once. They put in an ornamental pond one minute, they change the wallpaper the next, they remodel the whole thing from top to bottom when they’ve got the cash. Then they try and flog it off when they’re skint. So what if a footballer or an oligarch or some celebrity from reality TV buys it and puts a Jacuzzi in the octagon room? Or turns Reggie’s old bedroom into a walk-in closet? Darcy would have installed a fucking plunge pool at Pemberley if he’d known a decent plumber.”
    Ros didn’t laugh, but a ghost of a smile appeared on her face,enough to convince him that he was getting somewhere, that this dead weight might lift, or shift.
    Then her phone went, buzzing and squirming on the kitchen counter.
    “Geoff?” he said, handing it to her.
    She looked at the screen. “Maisie. Term’s only half over. She can’t have run out of money yet.” She punched a button. “Hi, sweetheart! What’s up? No, don’t worry, I haven’t gone to bed. Oh, good, good, you got the package, I’m pleased. How about that dress? Did you buy it in the end?” Ros chattered on brightly, looking as if she had just been given a transfusion of freshly oxygenated blood.
    Charlie squeezed his sister’s shoulder and murmured, “Don’t wash up. I’ll do it in the morning.”
    She nodded and waved, her ear pressed hard to the phone.
    *  *  *
    Three a.m. UK time, ten p.m. New York time, Charlie crept down to Tony’s office with his laptop. 19,081,487 people were on Skype. None of them was his wife. Beside her name was a little gray cloud with a white x in the middle of it. He tried her cell but it was switched off and he went straight through to voice mail. He left a message. Then he emailed her and texted her to tell her that he had emailed her.
    Charlie missed his wife. He had a wife-shaped hole in his life. But that was only temporary. He could buy a plane ticket right now and that hole would be filled. What was beginning to dawn on him was that his sister had a child-shaped hole in hers, which was