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of bringing you with him, so even when you knew the end was not possible you would get caught up in the getting there. It was a very contagious thing. There was something in his belief that was very contagious and made you wish you didn’t have an idea of reality sometimes. But the house was not an impossibility. The house justneeded the hours spent, the materials gathered, the skills applied.

    Hold came out of the shower and stood in the steam that roiled out of the small shower room and watched the motes of moisture catch the incoming light. Through the window he could see the house and there was, every time he looked at it, this recall of the promise he’d made. This unmovable, stone-built thing of it.
    â€œFinish it for him. Finish it for Jake.” Hold had sat by the bed, his wasting friend seeming to desiccate before him, and him hardly able to take in the actuality of it.
    He looked now at the way some of the limed whitewash was lifting, aged, off the wallstones and thought of his friend’s skin seeming to dry off, to flake away as he lay there. He looked out and saw that the stray cat had come to sit on the van bonnet for the dissolving warmth of the engine. He was always taking in strays; he preferred it to the responsibility of ownership.
    â€œI want to give him something to belong to,” said Danny.
    â€œI’ll do that,” Hold said. “I’ll do that thing.”
    Since then, any money he had he put into the things he needed for the house, and it was coming, bit by bit. He had long resolved for it to be a far-off thing to achieve, but now had come the bombshell. Danny’s sister wanted her share of the money from the place. It was like she’dheld out while Danny was alive, swayed by his promises that he’d find the money to buy her out. Then had come her divorce, and then Danny had gone. She needed the money, now. It was like this giant, final, impassable wall.
    Hold had tried everything he could. He had submitted a business plan to the bank himself, for a boat of his own, the likely return after three and five years, all as it said in the book he’d bought. He had been cautious and harsh with the plan but the figures still looked good, but the bank had simply refused. You have nothing. We can’t lend without security.
    His idea had been to borrow the money for the startup but to siphon some off and arrange to buy her out bit by bit, as the money came in. But Cara wouldn’t consider it. It was enough for her to know he had worked on the house for Jake. All these things he did were for Jake, they both had to believe that. It was academic anyway. He couldn’t raise the money.
    He took a sliver off one of the fillets and took it outside and gave the sliver to the stray. He had to choke down this moment of sudden anger at knowing that the house was going to slip away because of the one thing he could not compete on, money, and that this castle they’d played in would be knocked down and rebuilt and sold off to the highest bidder, almost certainly as a second home. He saw the two of them inside, juvenile, the dangerous fires they had lit there in secret, the things they’d invented with great weaponry valuehidden there, the plans they’d made, the first girlfriends they had brought there.
    â€œI could change it, if I had just one chance,” he thought. “If just one chance came along.” He watched the cat eat the fillet, half bolt it, the way the opportunist has to take his chance. He felt this great draw, this need to go to them, and he knew that taking the fillets was just yet another excuse, but there was a magnetism working, as if he was sucked into the great void of his friend at this time. It was like he felt the need to apologize for his failure to keep the house, but could not find the words. In this sudden failure there was some sort of need to be close to them, as if he wanted some sort of forgiveness from