about whether or not to tell anyone (my father, for one, didn’t he deserve to know that Hugo and I were both innocent?), but I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me; I had nothing left with which to debate this, assess this, think about this at all. It was like Susanna and Leon had dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.
I went about my routine methodically: breakfast and a shower, then up to the study for my day’s work. While I didn’t go as far as actually cooking, I did take breaks at the proper times to eat random assortments of things I found in the kitchen—someone, probably my mother, kept it stocked up with lavish quantities of stuff that didn’t need preparation. After dinner I sat in the living room with Hugo’s laptop and clicked around the internet until my brain shut down, at which point I went to bed. You’d expect I would have spent the nights tossing and turning, racked by grief and moral dilemmas and whatever else, or at least having more of those gruesome nightmares, but actually I slept like the dead.
I was doing well with Haskins’s diaries; now that I’d got the hang of his handwriting, I was ripping through them at a great pace. He went through a stage of trying to get the baby’s father’s name out of Elaine McNamara, who pissed him off royally by refusing to say. Haskins’s voice had become very clear in my head: nasal, heavily emphasized, overwhelmingly genteel, with a triumphant little throat-clear every time he had made some irrefutable point. One time, when I had been working for too long on a little too much Xanax (I was taking a fair amount again, not because I was tense exactly—I hadn’t gone back to pacing all night or beating myself up, none of that—but because it seemed like a much more sensible way to live), I asked him if he wanted coffee.
The only real change to the routine was the Sunday lunches, which by unspoken agreement weren’t happening any more. Someone called in every couple of days, presumably to make sure I wasn’t rocking and mumbling in a wardrobe or decomposing at the foot of the stairs, but I wasn’t very good conversation and they never stayed for long. Oliver gave me some speech about how we were all grieving but life went on, which I had absolutely no idea how to respond to; Miriam gave me a purple rock that promoted psychic healing, which I promptly lost. Leon rang me a few times; when I didn’t pick up, he left long, tentative, confused voice messages. I didn’t hear from Susanna at all, which was fine with me.
In April of 1888 Elaine McNamara had her baby—a boy, just like Hugo had figured, presumably Mrs. Wozniak’s grandfather. She “protested very vehemently and in great distress” when they took him away to give to the nice O’Hagans. Haskins explained to her that the way she was feeling was punishment for her sin, and she should be grateful that God still loved her enough to chasten her thus, but he didn’t think she really got it.
The house was going downhill, gradually enough that I didn’t notice it unless some chance thing caught my attention: weak wintry light picking out the cobwebs that festooned the high corners of the living room, a brush of my arm along a mantelpiece sending a swirl of dust motes into the air and leaving a thick streak down my sleeve. Lightbulbs blew and I didn’t replace them. In Leon’s old bedroom a stain was spreading across the ceiling, and there was a growing smell of damp coming from somewhere; I knew a plumber should take a look, but it felt impossible to make that kind of arrangement when I wasn’t sure whether I actually lived there or not, or for how long. No one had mentioned Hugo’s will, but it lurked uneasily in the corners of my mind: had he ever made the one he’d talked about, leaving the house to all six of us? who got it if he hadn’t? was someone going to be delegated to explain to me very tactfully that there was