Theo's second photograph arrived at eleven forty-seven in the morning.
I was in the east corridor replacing a light fitting when it came through. I did not hear the phone. I heard the quality of the house change, the specific atmospheric shift that happened when something significant arrived in it, that I had been reading for eighteen years through walls and floors and the particular density of silences that followed certain sounds. I finished the light fitting. I returned the stepladder to the storage cupboard. I walked to the kitchen with the even unhurried pace of someone who had learned that the speed at which you moved toward something did not change what it was going to be when you arrived.
The kitchen was already occupied.
Damon at the table with his phone. Theo beside him, coat
