Tess, as if gently nudged aside, retired to the sofa and watched. She began to bump her head rhythmically against the sofa cushion. About one beat per second, until Marguerite, passing, steadied her head with her hand.

This ryhthmic bumping, plus a worrisome speech-delay, had been Marguerite’s first clue that there was something different about Tessa. Not something wrong — Marguerite would not accede to that judgmental word. But, yes, Tess was different; Tess had some problems. Problems none of the well-intentioned therapists Marguerite had consulted were ever quite able to define. Most often they talked about idiosyncratic threshold-level autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Which meant: we have a labelled bin in which to toss your daughter’s symptoms, but no real treatment.

Marguerite had taken Tess for physiotherapy aimed at correcting her clumsiness and “poor proprioception,” had tried her on courses of drugs designed to modify her supply of serotonin or dopamine or Factor Q, none of which had made any perceptible change in Tess’s condition. Which implied, perhaps, only that Tess had an unusual personality; that her skewed aloofness, her social isolation, were problems she would have to carry indefinitely or overcome as an act of personal will. Fooling with her neurochemical architecture was counterproductive, Marguerite had come to believe. Tess was a child; her personality was still a work-in-progress; she should not be drugged or bullied into someone else’s notion of maturity.

And that had seemed like a plausible compromise, at least until Marguerite left Ray, until the trouble back at Crossbank.

There had not even been a newspaper this weekend.