The playfulness came back—again somehow shocking to see turning lithely in her eyes. “From time to time,” she said. The big dog reared up suddenly, putting its paws in her lap and pressing its cheek against hers, so that the two faces confronted Farrell with the same look of impenetrable laughter, except that Sia kept her mouth closed. He turned away for a moment, looking out of the window at the squat gathering of oaks behind the house. The glass reflected, not his face at all, but the single figure seated in the chair across from him. It had the vast stone body of a woman, and a dog’s grinning head.

The vision endured for less time than it took his eyes to translate, or his mind to sidestep, promising to write. When he turned again, Briseis had started after the butter, and Sia pushed her to the floor. “You are hurt.” There was neither alarm nor what Farrell would have called concern in her voice; if anything, she sounded slightly offended. He looked down at himself and noticed for the first time that his right shirtsleeve was ragged from wrist to elbow, the edges of the cut dappled rust-brown.

“Ah, it’s just a scratch,” he said. “I always wanted a chance to say that.” But Sia was beside him, rolling up his sleeve, although he protested earnestly, “Farrell’s Fifth Law: If you don’t look at it, it doesn’t hurt as much.” The wound was a long, shallow gouge, clean and uncomplicated, looking like nothing but what it was. He told her about Pierce/Harlow, carefully spinning the whole unlikely event into a harmless, idiotic tall tale, while she washed his arm and then drew the cut closed with butterfly bandages. The more he tried to make her laugh, the more tense and abrupt her hands became on him; whether with sympathy, apprehension or only contempt for his foolishness, he could not tell. He chattered on, helplessly compulsive, until she finished and stood up, muttering to herself like any ruinous ragbag lost in a doorway. Farrell thought at first that she was speaking in Greek.