Four thousand people came to bury Odessa Thornquist, and every one of them looked at Dilly's shoes.

She had known they would. The funeral was held in the Ferrymen's Hall by the river, a big brick pile with a clock tower that had been built by dockworkers who wanted somewhere to be sad in dry clothes, and by ten forty the benches were full, the gallery was full, and the overflow stood outside on the steps in the thin April drizzle with their phones held up like candles. The service would be streamed on the Tally app. A man at the door had told her cheerfully that this was the first time the Close had ever been interrupted by a funeral, because the city had decided to treat the hour as a vigil. People had taken the day off. Shops on Dray Street had closed. A bus driver had left a bus idling at the kerb with a handwritten sign in the window: GONE TO SEE ODESSA, BACK SOON.

Her shoes were black and flat and bought that morning with the first thousand dollars of Sel's money, a sum she had put into an envelope marked LOAN and slid under her own mother's till. She had a black wool dress, borrowed from Junie, two sizes too wide in the chest. She had a small black clip in her hair. She had, in her left sleeve, a tactical pen, because she had never in her life gone into a room she could not defend.

Nobody had said the oh. Not yet. But it was in the air, she could feel it, like the breath before a sneeze. Rows of heads turned at the back as she came down the aisle at Sel's right elbow, and the pew-whispers started, low, kind and lethal. That's her. That's the one. Is she really? Look at her. She's got nice posture.

"They've turned your hair into a hashtag," Junie breathed, from behind.

"Is it a good hashtag?"

"It's got nine thousand posts and one of them is a poem."

"Keep walking," said Sel, very softly, without moving his lips. He was in black, on his feet, his jaw set against the strain of forty yards of aisle. His left hand lay hooked in the crook of her right arm as if it belonged there, a long, cold, perfectly steady weight. "They are only looking because they cannot decide whether to be sorry for you."

"I'm not asking them to be sorry."

"No," he said. "That is why they cannot decide."

The coffin stood at the foot of the stage, closed, small, plain pine without a single flower on it. Odessa had left one instruction about it, which Bettina read aloud to the room before the service began. It said: NO LILIES. I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF BEING SMELLED AT.

The room laughed. It was a great, shaking, wet laugh, the sound of four thousand people who had been told they were allowed. Something in Dilly's chest, very small, unlocked.

They sat in the front pew, on the left. Across the aisle sat the Foundation board, eleven people in good dark clothes, and Maurice at the head of them in a black suit and a purple tie, gently weeping into a handkerchief with a monogram. A woman beside him, fifty, sharp-faced, with Odessa's cheekbones and none of her mercy, met Dilly's eye for one long moment and looked away. "Greta," Sel murmured. "My cousin. She chairs the finance committee. She will vote with him on anything that makes her richer. She is very good at arithmetic."

Maurice gave the first eulogy. He gave it without notes. He told a story about how Odessa had once taught him to ride a bicycle by pushing him down Pellow Hill and shouting that the brakes were for cowards. He did the voice. People wept laughing. He talked about the bank as a family. He called it a trust, a promise, a hand held out, and he paused a moment before the last word, and in the pause Dilly watched four thousand people decide they liked him.

It was masterful. She knew masterful. It was exactly what a good principal does at a rope line. It did not make her angry; it made her tired. She sat with her hands in her lap and watched Sel's face as his uncle sat down to a wave of tender applause, and she saw the muscle in his jaw jump, once, and saw his hand on his knee close until the knuckles went white.

Then it was his turn.

He rose. For a heartbeat she thought he would not make it; his weight pitched forward and she came half off the pew with her hand already out. He steadied. He stepped past her, and she did not touch him, because he had looked at her once and shaken his head, a very small movement, and walked to the lectern like a man crossing ice.

He unfolded a sheet of paper. He looked at it. He folded it again and put it in his pocket.

"My grandmother," he said, "told me when I was eleven that a person is not what they own but what they refuse to be bought for. I assumed she was speaking of the bank. It took me twenty-two years to understand that she was speaking of her family."

The hall, which a moment ago had been shifting and coughing, went still.

"She was not an easy woman to love. She would say so herself. She would say it with considerable satisfaction. I would like to tell you something that she would have been furious at me for saying. She was afraid. Not of money, and not of death. She was afraid of leaving us with a house that could not hold us. Every one of you at some time has stood in that line at Fairhold and been called by your first name. She taught the tellers to do that. She said that a bank is the only place in the world where a stranger is trusted with the whole of your life, and the least it can do is learn your name." His voice, which had been low and exact, cracked on the last word, and he waited, and it came back. "I do not know if I can be what she was. I know that I will be there, tonight, at the desk, at eleven fifty-eight, and tomorrow, and the night after. I know that if I am not there, someone will be. I wanted you to hear it from me."

He stopped. He stood looking at the coffin.

Then he looked at the front row, at Dilly, for no reason she could name, and said in a smaller voice, "That is all."

Nobody clapped. They did something else. The whole of the hall rose together, with a sound like a field of wheat, and stood, and that was the applause.

She lost him for ninety seconds at the reception, which in her old life would have been a firing offence. A grandmother in a hat had seized his hand; a man in a delivery vest, the same one from the laundromat, was telling him about his mother's loan; the line of mourners curled round the hall like a river. She stood at the wall behind him with a cup of tea she had not touched, counting. Four doors. Eleven board members. Two men from the press, one very obviously wearing a lanyard in his pocket. A sound technician with a headset who was filming more than the service needed.

Murmur was alive in everyone's hands. The old woman by the urn was watching a clip of the eulogy with the sound off. Two teenagers were making a face at a screen. She heard someone say, beside her, in a perfectly conversational tone, "I thought she'd be taller," and someone else answer, "She is taller. It's the black."

She decided she could cope with being a small piece of the town's afternoon.

When the room became too much she went out through the side door to the car park, where it was cold and wet and almost empty, and put her back against the wall and breathed. The drizzle had thickened to a mist. The clock in the tower struck one. Across the tarmac, a woman in a camel coat got out of a small grey hire car and stood quite still beside it, looking at her.

Dilly knew her at once. It was a face she had spent four months memorising from eleven angles. Priya Ventura was thirty-six, small and fine-boned, with cropped black hair going grey at one temple and a posture like a pulled thread. She was the founder of a payments company called Hollowell, which had been a start-up a year ago and was now the thing the whole financial press called the Fairhold killer. She had been the woman at the podium. She had a very thin white line along her left temple, where the edge of a tray had cut her.

Dilly's body did what it had done every time for fourteen months. It tightened and prepared to apologise.

"Ms. Ventura," she said.

"Priya." She came forward over the wet tarmac, hands in her coat pockets. "I'm sorry. I should have rung. I didn't think you'd pick up."

"I would have."

"Would you?" Priya almost smiled. "I'd have bet money that you wouldn't. You never returned my letters."

"I didn't think you'd want—" Dilly stopped, and started again, because she was an adult. "I owe you an apology. I should have apologised fourteen months ago. I stood there and you were hurt, and I've never known how to say it."

"It was a pie," said Priya. "A lemon meringue, if you care. It didn't even break the skin. The cut was from the tray." She touched the white line at her temple. "I was never angry at you. I want that to be clear. I spent a month being angry at the internet. And then I spent a month being curious."

"About what?"

"About why a woman who had stood in front of me through a hundred and forty events without a single lapse would just stop. Because you didn't flinch, Dilnoza. I've seen the footage frame by frame, more times than you. A person who flinches moves. You went rigid. Like somebody had pulled a plug."

A cold prickle ran down Dilly's back.

"Odessa Thornquist rang me in June," Priya said. "Out of the blue. I thought it was a joke. We'd never met. She'd read about Hollowell, and she thought I'd been unfairly treated at that launch. She said she'd like to buy me a coffee. I flew down. We sat in her library for two hours, and she asked me a single question, and I could not answer it."

"What question?"

Priya looked at her very steadily. Her voice was quiet and the mist beaded in her hair.

"She asked: who was standing on Dilnoza Karimova's left?"