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wall would have killed him.”
    “Mom. The wall would not have killed him.”
    “I was doing mini–palm trees. I hid it behind that old Japanese screen. I didn’t want him to see till it was too late to do anything about it.” She took off her oversized glasses and rubbed her face with both hands, like a diver taking off her mask after a deep descent. “And now it’s all too late! I don’t know any of his passwords. Can you believe it? I can’t even find his keys! I can’t even get into the basement!”
    He made a mental note to locate those keys later with a spell. He might even be able to come up with the passwords too, though that would be trickier.
    Part of the trouble between Quentin and his parents, he knew, was that they had no idea who he really was, which wasn’t their fault because he’d never told them. Quentin’s mom thought her son was a comfortably but not spectacularly successful investment banker specializing in real estate transactions. She didn’t know that magic was real. Quentin’s father hadn’t known either.
    Quentin could have told them—the information was tightlycontrolled by magicians, and transgressions were punished sharply, but exceptions could be obtained for parents and spouses (and children over fourteen). But he never had, because it seemed like such a terrible idea. He couldn’t imagine the two worlds touching: his parents’ sedate, orderly marital idyll and the wild, messy, arcane world of magic. It was impossible. They would explode on contact, like matter and antimatter.
    Or he always assumed they would. Now he wondered if that secret, the absence of that confidence, was what had come between them. Maybe he’d underestimated them.
    Quentin and his mother spent his week of leave rattling around the Chesterton McMansion like two dice in a plastic cup—it was a huge house for a middling-successful painter and a textbook editor, bought with money from a Brooklyn brownstone they’d cashed out of at just the right time. There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.
    Quentin spent a whole day on the phone with his mother’s credit cards fanned out on the cold kitchen counter in front of him. She watched him with wary surprise. They’d seen so little of each other these past few years that she still thought of him as the shoe-gazing teenager he’d been when he left for Brakebills. She was baffled by this tall, firm, no-longer-teenaged man who presented her with lists of urns to choose from, menus of hors d’oeuvres for the reception, times when town cars would pick her up and drop her off.
    At night they ordered take-out and played Scrabble and watched movies on the couch, drinking the melony Sonoma Chardonnay that she ordered by the case. At the back of his mind Quentin kept cuing up and replaying scenes from his childhood. His father teaching him to sail on a sandy-bottomed, brown-water lake in New Hampshire. His father picking him up from school after he got sick in gym class. When he was twelve they’d had a full-scale blowout shouting match when his father refused to sign the permission slip for Quentin to go to a chesstournament; it was the first time he’d qualified in the under-fifteens, and he was desperate to make the trip to Tarrytown. It was strange: his father had never seemed comfortable with Quentin’s efforts to stand out academically. You’d think he would’ve been proud.
    That first night, after his mom went to bed, Quentin went and sat in his father’s study. It was a boxy, white-walled room that still smelled like new construction. The parquet looked brand new except for the matte circle where the wheels of his father’s desk chair had worn away the finish. He was half drunk on