6:04 a.m., and the house is asleep. You come down to the boot room and Alistair Croft is already there, on the bench under the coat hooks in yesterday's shirt, sleeves rolled past the elbow, collar open at the throat, reading glasses on, eleven blue envelopes spread along the bench beside him. He takes the glasses off when the door moves and does not put them back on.

he says, and does not look up.

Frost stands along the third row of the orchard and on the glass of the cold frames. The room smells of wet wool, linseed oil and cold stone. His good shoes wait by the door with last night's mud dried grey across the toes. One arm is pressed flat against his side, where the rib he cracked off a polo pony in September has an opinion about the temperature.

The envelopes are your great-aunt Beatrix Hollis's: blue paper, her slanted hand, postmarks going back further than either of you. Square under his elbow, soft at the corner from years of being opened, lies the 2007 diversion file, his glasses now folded on top of it. The signet is on his right hand, which is the wrong one; it was his father's, and he moved it the week he signed the settlement.

He lifts one envelope by the corner, reads two lines of it, and sets it down the way a man stacks plates he cannot afford to break. The tea he made at half past five has gone cold beside his boot. Behind the wall the boiler ticks and settles.

You have seen this room at every hour of the morning: the boots in their row, the dogs' blankets folded on the shelf, the cabinet he has not opened since the wedding. What you have not seen is your own family's name in the margin of his file, in his handwriting, underlined twice.

He squares the letters into a stack, lays the diversion file on top, and slides the whole thing along the bench until it stops against your knee.