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I asked about Grandma Josephine, who I was starting to think was what one of Charlie Bucket’s grandparents was called in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It turned out she slept till noon most days, which I decided was what I was going to do when I was ninety or whatever she was.

Olivia said their grandmother had come over from America to look after them when their mother died. Which I guess meant that they had both been one good grandma from having followed the same path I did, and having their lives ruled by earlier versions of Aamir, Frank, and Stacey-Ray.

The grandmother unexpectedly entered the kitchen, nightcap in one hand, still half asleep. It didn’t seem that she could have overheard our conversation, but she appeared to have done so. “It’s a terrible thing to lose a parent, but to lose a child, for a mother to lose her daughter, that’s a whole other ocean.”

“You’re up early!” Concerned, Olivia got to her feet and gently steered the old woman to the breakfast table.

“I’ve got to get back,” I announced, swigging down the last of my tea.

“I feel we may have mentioned that fact several times last night.” Xavier looked up from his newly cooked eggs, which he had been eating with a brain surgeon’s precision.

My plan had been to find Sophie and to climb back into my room so my absence would never have been registered. Now I thought I might as well go back and face the music. If Sophie hadn’t returned, then I could always make another break for freedom and continue—or more realistically, start—my search.

“I should go.” I stood, knocking the table unintentionally and setting everything rattling. “Uh…where are we?”

“I’ll drive you.” Xavier dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, as if he were in a high-end restaurant rather than his own home.

The offer of a lift included me helping to lug several cardboard boxes of assorted paperbacks into the rear of Xavier’s beaten-up estate car. In fact, I ended up carrying all of them except the small one Xavier started the process off with.

I got into the passenger seat, wincing at the various sorenesses from my close encounter with Colin’s love wagon the night before. The most painful of my reminders, however, was whatever that muscle is that lies between the shoulder and the neck. Where the tramp had pincered me, I hurt more than at any of my points of collision with metal and tarmac.

As Xavier drove, thankfully not making small talk, flashes of the attack—because that’s what it was—came back to me. Or at least they seemed like memories, but they were so surreal that I wondered now whether knocking my head on the road or car or both hadn’t scrambled my recollections with whatever nightmares had visited me on the Books’ couch.

That impossibly deep eye socket, like the throat of a sandworm right out of Dune, or whatever that big mouth-thing on Star Wars was, the one that people got thrown into. The sewer cover just breaking under his feet. Had I really punched him? Even that didn’t sound like me. I’d always worried about what would happen if I let go of my anger and really hit someone. It turns out that you hurt your hand and they laugh at you…

“Hey, wait! Stop!” We’d almost passed Greg before I noticed him walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the road.

“I was just about to. We need to unload.” Xavier pulled up smoothly in front of his bookshop.

I leaped out and hollered at Greg, now twenty yards past us. “Is Sophie back?”

For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me over the high-street traffic, but he turned and looked at me as if I’d just come down the off-ramp of a flying saucer.

“Sophie?” I shouted. “Is she back?”

He stared stupidly at me. Maybe wondering what I was doing getting out of a car with a well-dressed man. He seemed on the point of answering, as if the words had finally percolated down to his brain, but then bent his head to rub furiously at his eye.

“Uh…yeah.” He straightened and repeated himself more loudly, with a grimace. “Yeah. She’s back. You’d better stay away till the dust settles. Jacey’s on the warpath.”

“Thanks…” I waved as he turned away. Jacey was far from my biggest fan anyway. I think it was her that got me labeled as “oppositionally defiant,” and I’d been pointedly agreeing with every single thing she said ever since. Which had definitely started to get under her skin. She had a nasty tongue on her and I was too sore to deal with it today. Plus, the state I was in, climbing up to bypass the reception committee was out of the question.

Xavier, carrying the smallest box of books again, coughed pointedly from the open hatch at the back of his station wagon.

“You know your sister hit me with a car last night, right?” I winced as I hefted one of the big boxes out of the boot.

“I understand it was Colin who was driving.” Xavier led the way in, unlocking the door while holding his box on his hip with one hand. “And that you didn’t give him any opportunity not to. So, while I need very little excuse to find fault with Colin, you’re not really giving me any excuse for it at all. Didn’t they ever teach you the stop-look-listen thing?”

“I was running away from a guy who attacked me.”

“Attacked?”

“Grabbed me, then.”

Xavier indicated where to put the box. “He was probably less dangerous than a car. But you should report it to the police.” He brought a kettle out from behind the shop counter. “The other boxes can go next to that one.”

After I’d shifted all the rest of the boxes, and Xavier had made coffee, I stood expectantly, until he took the hint.

“Only the one cup. Sorry. Feel free to look around though.” He picked up the book he’d been reading the day before.