But he was dying an entirely different death than the one that had been coming for him in that cold mansion, hurried and lonely and afraid.

Here there was sun, and the sound of a boy laughing on the lawn, and a dog asleep across his feet, and a woman who brought him tea and sat with him and wanted nothing from him but his company.

He was leaving the world slowly now, gently, on his own terms, in the middle of a family that had assembled itself out of nowhere in his final year, a family he had, in the strangest way, hired into being and then been surprised to find was real.

Whatever else I did with the strange gift Arthur gave me, I like to think I gave him that in return: not more time, which no one could give him, but a better ending than the one his own blood had been arranging.