“And he’d say she was an old animal, son. He’d say it in that voice. And then I’d have driven home with that.”

He has not been back. Lia knows where her grandfather is and has never asked to go, and I have never offered, and that is the whole of what I have to say about Arthur Vance.

Chapter 18 — August

Max died on the fourteenth of August, at home, on her bed in the corner of Lia’s room, at about eleven in the morning.

Lia decided. She had been given the whole picture — the vet at Ridgeway was extraordinary about it, sat with a fifteen-year-old for forty minutes on two separate occasions and talked to her and not to us — and Lia took eleven days after the last appointment and then came down one morning and said, “This week.”

Then she said, “Tuesday.”

I asked her, later, why Tuesday, and she said: “Because it happened on a Tuesday. And I wanted the last one to be one I picked.”