Afterword

I owe several debts in the writing of this book — the largest to Marta, who is not the Marta of the novel but whose patience is. She read the manuscript twice and offered, on each occasion, the same single piece of advice: less. I have, mostly, taken it.

Thanks also to the man with the damp patch, who I now know was a maintenance contractor named Hugh, who never said his name to me out of professional courtesy and not out of mystery, and who would, I suspect, be surprised to find himself in a book.

The clock in the yellow-chair room is a real clock, in a real room, in a real city I will not name. Both the clock and the chair are still there at the time of writing. The bird, of course, is long gone.

— L., late autumn