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the drive up and the summer heat followed by the blue coolness of the woods reminded Jane of summers at her family’s cottage at the Lakes when their mum was between research posts or teaching semesters—summers full of walks and hill climbing. Jane had been twelve and Lewis ten and bratty the last time they’d gone up. Lewis’s favourite pastime that year was sailing through the main room of the cottage to thwap whatever book Jane was reading with his hand before presenting himself to their mum and stating, “Claire, we need milk,” or“Claire, I’d like a microscope.” And Claire would glance up from the clutter of papers on her desk under the open stairs and say, “Of course, Mr. Standen, whatever you want.”
    About twenty minutes into their walk, the trees to Jane and Lily’s left thinned, and Jane could make out the edge of a flat pasture at the top of a sloping rise, a ribbon of sun along its border. After a while a stone fence took its place, and every now and again one of the sheep in the upper field would baa and Lily would stop and stare at the ridge as if she expected to see a lamb standing there. William, by then, had gone even farther ahead, moving through the brome and couch grass, the troughs of fern. When he’d been gone for a while Lily started to pick up leaves and snatch bits of bushes, trying to imitate her father. Wiping her hands on her red dungarees and traipsing along beside Jane, she asked a litany of questions that all began with Why? or How come? or What if? Jane tried her best to answer, to explain why some animals had stripes and some spots, why leaves float and why if Luisa said that Lily’s mother was in heaven, then that was clearly where she was. Lily made a fish face at that and blew on the key that swung from a white ribbon around her neck. It was the key to Jane’s grandparents’ house. Lily had noticed it on the ribbon wound around Jane’s wrist during lunch at the pub in the village; she’d gently tried to tug it off while Jane was doing her best to sit up straight and have a grown-up conversation with William over soggy cod and chips.
    “Did your father put you up to the cello?” he’d asked.
    “No. Well, sort of.”
    “It must be difficult—the expectations people have.”
    Jane had stabbed at a pea with her fork and missed, and the tine had made a scraping noise on the plate; she’d checked to see if William noticed. “We don’t see him much, unless he has a concert in London. Right now he’s back in France.” She heard herself say “back in France” and liked how important it sounded, liked how it made her father a busy man, famous, foreign.
    On her second day minding Lily, when she’d started to look more closely around William’s house, she’d rifled through the music collection and saw that he had Henri’s Liszt recording and Paganini caprices, which were her favourite. There was a strange electric pleasure in seeing her father’s image on the CD cover in William’s house—it was a still from one of his Berlin concerts, the violin tucked under his chin, his black hair just long enough to toss back with effect and an expression she sometimes thought of as rage on his face.
    “I’ve never seen him play—” William began, stopping when he saw Lily tugging at Jane’s wrist. He reached across the table and gently grabbed her hand. “Lily, stop that.”
    “It’s fine.” Jane smiled at William and loosened the strands of the ribbon until she could loop the whole thing off her wrist. “You can play with it. Just don’t lose it.” She handed Lily the key and the girl lit up, started spinning it. Jane glanced at William, hoping she’d done the right thing, that he’d think she was a good minder, that he’d go back to asking her questions about her life. Hoping, too, that this wanting to get to know her meant something, that it was a kind of affection.
    William spent most of the walk taking samples and photographs and jotting plant names on