I had not been afraid in years.I noticed it in that chair, with the last of the fire warming my shins and the morning thickening at the edge of the curtain. It came over me gradually, the way you notice a sound that has been going on for some time. It wasn't the sharp, quick fear of a shout in a dark room. It was lower and slower than that, a coldness that started in the stomach and spread outward until my fingers felt like they belonged to somebody else.I looked at my hands. They lay on my knees, quite still. They didn't look afraid. That was the odd part.I'd forgotten what it was like.---I had spent a long time making myself unafraid.It had been a kind of discipline. For three years I'd sat at Victor Grant's table and taken what he handed me, the jokes, the silences, the slow, easy contempt, and I'd taught myself that none of it could reach anything that mattered. I'd told myself there was nothing there to hurt. A man who had already lost what he had to lose isn't afraid of a

"Daniel," Margaret said, "was sitting where you are."It took me a moment to understand she meant the chair. I felt the arms of it under my hands, solid and ordinary, and I had the strangest sense that the room had tilted by a few degrees."Not this room," she said. "I don't mean that. But he sat just so, with his hands on his knees. You've done it all night." She didn't look at me. She was speaking to the coals, as she'd promised. "I kept thinking, at first, that I'd imagined it. And then I couldn't stop.""Go on," Sophia said, very softly."I'd been there nearly an hour, as I told you. Drinking tea. Saying nothing. He'd let me sit, and I'd understood by then that he'd let me sit all night if I needed it." Her thumb moved against her ring. "And then he said it. *You came to tell me something. You don't have to be afraid of it.* And I opened my mouth and I heard myself say…"She stopped.I watched her gather it. She didn't close her eyes this time. She kept them on the grate, steady,

Margaret's hand went to the pocket of her cardigan.I'd noticed the pocket earlier without noticing it, the way you register a piece of furniture. It was a deep, shapeless pocket on the right side, the kind knitted garments have, and the wool around it had stretched. Through all the long hours of the night, her right hand had never been far from it. She'd rested it there when she was frightened. She'd pressed it flat against her hip when she wept.I thought: *She's been carrying it.*"I took it out of its place," she said. "Three nights ago. After I telephoned you, Sophia. After I put down the receiver in the cold and stood there thinking, *If I don't do it now, I'll never do it.*" She drew her hand slowly into the light. "I didn't know whether I'd use it. I only knew I couldn't leave it where it was.""Where was it?" Sophia asked."Somewhere your father has never looked." The corner of her mouth moved. "I won't say where. Not today. It's a very small place, and I've only just stopped

For a while after I put the letter away, no one spoke.It wasn't the heavy quiet of before. The worst of it had passed. What was left was the hush that follows a storm, when everything has been moved a little from where it stood and you sit in the wreckage waiting to see whether the roof will hold. The fire had gone to a faint red glow. The light along the floor had reached the toe of Margaret's slipper. She had pulled her feet under the hem of her skirt, and she sat very small on the end of the sofa, her hands open in her lap.They looked strange to me, those hands, without anything in them. They looked as though they didn't know what they were for.Sophia was the first to move.She slid off the sofa and onto her knees on the rug in front of her mother, and took both those empty hands in hers. It was an odd position for a grown woman, almost a child's, and she held it without self-consciousness."Mother," she said. "I need to ask you for something."Margaret looked down at her. "You'

Marcus did not stop by on Monday morning.I noticed it at half past nine, the way you notice a clock that has stopped. For months he had come at that hour, give or take a minute, and stood in my doorway with his hands clasped and said it was a quiet start to the day. I had come to expect the shape of him in the frame of the door as I expected the light from the window. That Monday the hour came and went, and the doorway stayed empty.I didn't go looking. I sat with my papers and listened to the floor.At twenty to ten, there was a knock. It was a small, correct knock, three taps, spaced evenly. Marcus stood in the corridor with a folder under his arm, and he waited on the threshold, not in it, until I looked up."I wanted to say that I've begun on the Hartwell materials," he said. "I'll have a preliminary memorandum for you by tomorrow evening.""There's no hurry.""I'd prefer not to keep you waiting." He smiled. "May I?""Of course."He laid the folder on the corner of my desk, bowed