By Sunday the flat at Switchback 14 had a new government.
Hepzibah Ibekwe had taken the kitchen at six in the morning. By the time Dez came out of her room, the table had been moved eighteen inches to the left, the star anise had been relocated to a high shelf ("poison, in quantity"), and Bao Tran stood at the stove in his cardigan stirring something under the instruction of a seventy-one-year-old woman in a wheelchair who was calling him *the thin cook*.
"Not like that," said Hepzibah.
"I'm doing it the way I always do it."
"And look how thin you are." She pointed a wooden spoon at him. "A man cannot make a stew with a sad wrist."
"It's a *gentle* wrist, Mama Hepzibah."
"It is a sad one." She turned, and her small black eyes found Dez, who had been standing in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. "You. Tall one. Come and taste this and tell this boy he is wrong."
Tamar, asleep on an air mattress in the corner of the living room under a duvet printed with dinosaurs, stirred, mumbled "Nan, it's Sunday," and put the duvet over her head. Dez tasted the stew. It was very good. She said so. Bao made a noise like a man receiving a medal and a funeral at once.
She had meant to stay. She had meant, in fact, to spend the day on the sofa and the stairs and the balcony, with a legal pad, working out what a menu called WEIGHT INBOUND could mean. But at nine her phone had buzzed with a message from a number she hadn't saved. **Dez. Neil. Mum's asked to meet you today. She saw the video. Larchmont Court, eleven. Sorry for the short notice, folks. N.**
She had stared at the message for a long time.
Then she had put on the black suit.
---
Larchmont Court was on the Rim, in a side street of glass and ornamental grasses, and had the sort of lobby where the carpet muffled everything, including conversation. A young man at the desk smiled at her over a tablet. A visitors' book lay open on a lectern, an actual book, with a ribbon and a pen on a chain. She signed it. She read, out of habit, the signatures above hers: *N. Abara-Whitfield, 3 Oct. B. Oyelowo-Marsh, 5 Oct.* And twice more, in a neat blue slanting hand, *C. Oyelaran, Risk Consultant, 2 Oct. 8 Oct.*
"Oyelaran?" she said.
"Mr Oyelaran's with the Authority's insurers," said the young man. "He checks on all the residents with family in senior roles. A very nice gentleman. He brings the biscuits."
She wrote the name on the back of her hand with the pen on the chain, a thing she did not know she was doing until she looked down. Then she went through a pair of sliding doors and out onto a terrace of glass that hung over the drop like a held breath.
The woman sitting at the far end of it, under a patio heater, was reading a paperback with a broken spine.
She was small and upright, with a silver bob and half-moon spectacles on a chain, a brass-handled stick propped against the table beside a cup of tea. Her cardigan was plum-coloured. Her ankles, in thick tights, were crossed with great precision. She looked up when Dez's shadow fell on the page and, for a moment, her face did nothing at all.
"Ah," said Lorraine Abara-Whitfield. "The tall one."
"Mrs Abara-Whitfield. I'm so sorry. I'm —"
"Sit down. You're blocking the heater."
Dez sat. The chair was lower than she'd expected. She folded her hands between her knees and found she couldn't look anywhere except at the brass duck's head on the stick, which was, absurdly, looking back.
"I'm going to say something first," Dez said, "and then you can send me away."
"Are you going to apologise?"
"Yes."
"Don't." Lorraine took off her spectacles. "I've had eleven months of people apologising for my son. My doctor, my physio, the woman from the *Gazette*, a man from the Authority with a fruit basket. I'm sick of it. It's a sort of rot. You'll make me say *it's all right, dear*, and then you'll go away feeling lighter and I'll still have a hip with a screw in it."
"I should have —"
"You should have what? Looked up?" The old woman set the glasses on the table with a little click. "I was on that stage for a *photograph*, Miss Novak-Obi. Cornelius wanted a picture. Mother and son, the great man and his roots. He put me at the front, on the lip, in heels, because it looked better. I said, *Neil, I'll fall.* He said, *You won't, Mum, there's security.*" A thin smile. "And there was. A very tall one. Looking at her telephone."
Dez's face was hot. "My mother had sent me a voice note."
"I know. I watched the footage a hundred times. I'm retired, I've got nothing else." Lorraine's eyes were very pale and very direct. "I watched you look at it, you know. That little downward turn. Quick as anything. I thought: *Oh. She has a mother.*" She let that sit. "I taught geography for thirty-eight years. I've seen eleven thousand children look at their telephones in the wrong second. It isn't a sin. It's a *face.* It's the face of someone who has been told she's going to be fine and has decided to believe it."
"That's not an excuse."
"No. It's the truth, which is different, and in my experience more useful." She lifted the stick, laid it across her knees, and regarded Dez over the duck. "I'll tell you what I do forgive. Nothing. Because there's nothing to forgive. You were a bodyguard who looked at her phone, and I was a woman in the wrong shoes, and between us we gave forty million strangers a very good afternoon. If you want to feel terrible about it, go ahead. But stop making it *my job.*"
Dez sat very still. Behind her breastbone, in the place where all the other people lived, nothing stirred. It was a strange silence. It was the first time in eleven months she could remember wanting to cry in daylight.
"Thank you," she said. It came out rough.
"Don't mention it. Have a biscuit."
There was a plate. She took a biscuit. It was a shortbread, hard and cold and entirely perfect, and she ate it in three bites while the heater ticked and a gull wheeled below them, a quarter-mile down.
"Your mother," said Lorraine. "The voice note. What does she do?"
"She's a seamstress. Retired."
"Of course she is." The old woman nodded slowly, as at a sum that had come out. "Hands that know where a seam will fail. I had a mother like that. She could look at a coat and tell you which button would go first. It's a terrible gift. They can't be told anything about the world that they haven't already noticed in the hem." She sipped. "Does she know you're here?"
"She'd say I should have brought flowers."
"She'd be right. Next time bring daffodils. I'm told it's unlucky, but I like to live dangerously."
For a minute they said nothing. The sun had come up over the opposite wall of the canyon and lit it from the top down, ledge by ledge, until the whole city stood in gold stripes with the Floor still blue in its shadow, and Dez, watching it, thought that she had never once looked at Ketterline from this height without a client at her elbow.
---
"He's a good boy, you know," said Lorraine, after a while. "He's a coward, and he's vain, and he thinks if he smiles at a problem it will leave. But he's good. He sends flowers on my late husband's birthday. He still cries at the national anthem." She turned her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "You're his bodyguard now. He's told me. So I'll tell you something I've never told anybody, and you'll do whatever you think best with it."
"Mrs Abara-Whitfield —"
"It's *Lorraine*. And don't stop me, dear, I'm eighty-one, I have no use for being polite." She looked at the drop. "Nine years ago. Pasadera. I was staying with Neil that week, in the big house up on Crest Road. My Albert had just died, and Neil wanted me close. It was two nights before the flood. The seventh. He was flying out to Lisbon the next morning for a conference. At about twenty past eleven his mobile rang on the kitchen table."
Dez said nothing.
"I was making cocoa. I looked at the screen. It said, N. PAREDES, in brackets, LOCKS. He picked it up. He said, *Hello?* And he listened. For four minutes, I counted by the cooker clock. He said, *I see. Yes. I'll look into it.* And that was all. He put it down, drank his cocoa, went to bed. The next day he flew to Lisbon. The day after that, the gate."
The gull was gone. The patio heater ticked.
"The inquiry asked him," Lorraine said. "Under oath. Whether he'd had any prior contact with residents of Pasadera Street about the drainage or the lifts. And he said, *None whatsoever.* And I sat in the public gallery and thought, *Oh, Cornelius.*" She smoothed her cardigan. "I don't know what that man said to him. I don't know what he asked. I only know my son took a call from a locksmith on a Wednesday night, and by Friday thirty-one people were dead, and my son has never again spoken of it. Not one word. He keeps a model funicular on his desk. He's built a *railway.*"
She picked up her tea. She did not drink it.
"I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm telling you because you're the first person in eleven months who looked me in the face and didn't tell me it was all right." The pale eyes were wet, now, and quite steady. "If you're going to stand in front of my son, my dear, find out what he's standing in front of."
