Hugo, with some eerie sensitivity, stopped packing and lifted his head, and his dark eyes crossed the empty hall and locked onto me — and there was no shock in them, no confusion, none of the recognition a boy gives a long-lost father.

He looked at me with the cold, analytical calm of a scientist examining a mildly unpleasant insect.

Atticus turned too.

Four eyes the exact shape and color of my own pinned me to the wall, and under them the titan Roderick Wolcott ceased to exist.

I was only a frightened, pathetic man shrinking before the boys he had abandoned.

Coraline followed their gaze and turned, and our eyes met, and the silence that fell was total — thirteen years of two lives running in opposite directions, colliding in a sterile backstage corridor.

I took a trembling step and my lips parted.