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that it smashed.
    Back in the sitting room, Felix tossed a beer each to Jake and Matt, then stretched out next to Kerry. Her jacket was back on, and her appearance less provocative, but the shift in the atmosphere had not been so easily remedied. Tara was staring through a fine veil of hair. The men were ignoring her now, Matt and Jake in conversation. Will was ostentatiously ignoring Kerry, as he did all attractive young women. The tension a stranger can introduce is different from the kind that can exist between people who know one another well. It is less elastic, more likely to shatter than stretch.
    Felix curled an arm around his mute, beautiful girlfriend. Unusually it was the eager expression on his face rather than the features of it that showed his vulnerability. Kerry made no reciprocal gesture and Sophie was struck again by the conviction that such an uneven match could only end in Felix getting terribly hurt. For the first time since Lydia’s death Sophie was glad that her mother was not around to see what might unfold.

5
    SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2013
    E DIE HAD SERVED her purpose as a human bolster in the night: now she functioned as a human alarm clock, seizing a fistful of her mother’s hair and hooking a fat little finger up her nose. Sophie gathered her daughter, still in her sleeping bag, into her arms and got out of bed. The open bathroom door and the synthetic citrus scent of disinfectant told her that Rowan was already up and the previous night’s mess dealt with.
    Tara was in the sitting room, doing halfhearted sun salutations on the Indian rug. Rowan was at the kitchen table, a pot of tea on the go, looking fresher than he deserved to.
    “Edie!” he said brightly. “Come and say good morning to Grandpa!” He bounced the baby on his lap.
    “Dad, are you OK?”
    “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    He was using his headmaster’s voice, which meant that this conversation would go the way he wanted it to—in this case, no further. Fine. It was with relief that she let the subject go. There were enough difficult conversations to be had as it was.
    Rowan stroked Edie’s cheek. “She’s so like you were at her age, Sophie. It’s like having you back again.”
    “I’m right here,” she said, but she knew exactly what he meant.
    Outside, dawn was tentatively uncloaking the gray garden, the naked orchard of knuckle-dragging fruit trees, the piles of leaves, the lawn turned to mud. Although Sophie had spent all her childhood summers here, when she thought about the garden it was always in this state, stripped for winter, brown and bare. It was as wild and sprawling as their courtyard garden at home was cultivated. It sloped gently upward and a foot-high dry stone wall separated it from a scattering of crumbling outbuildings that were all that remained from the estate’s days as a working farm. A hundred yards over the prow of the hill stood a derelict laborer’s cottage. Only its shell survived, each strong wind robbing the roof of a few more of its remaining tiles. Ugly steel shutters at the doors and windows kept the children out.
    The farmhouse itself—a tiny, two-roomed shack—had been three centuries old when it was pulled down by Lydia’s grandfather. This had been in the 1950s and before the conservation movement had reached their part of Devon. The old foundations had finally been dug out just five years ago, with the intention of leveling the land and building a cabin on the site to create an overspill barn for the growing family. Planning permission had never been granted and the right-hand side of the garden remained a maze of deep dykes and ditches, which the boys had commandeered for a mysterious, noisy war game known as Death in the Trenches. Next door Tara’s exhalations developed an air of conclusion, prompting Sophie to consider that this might be the last time all weekend she had her father to herself. It seemed important that they discuss Lydia’s ashes alone, a legacy of the