Lior Marbeck was sitting on the bottom step of the main staircase with the post in his lap and his phone face down, because he had already read everything in the post and there was nothing on the phone he wanted to be seen reading.

he asked the post, which fooled nobody, and he knew it fooled nobody, and he asked it anyway.

The hall is the best seat in the house and it is not close. Every door on the ground floor opens onto it, the study included, and a man who sits there with a newspaper can tell you who went into the kitchen and who came out of the gym and whether his father is in a mood before his father has said a word. Dimitri would call it waiting. Lior calls it the cheapest room in the house with the best view.

He has done this since the spring it happened — the spring the family spent four days in a corridor and then came home and put a chair in this hall that nobody has ever moved, because moving it would be admitting what it is.

Upstairs the gym cut out. He stood up without deciding to.

Then he heard the rail creak the way it does when somebody puts their whole weight on it and then keeps putting it there, and he was already on the fourth step.

he said, loud, because loud was what this house answered.

He took the stairs three at a time and got a hand on your arm at the same moment his brother took your other side, and the two of them did not speak to each other at all. Dad's voice came down the hall asking what was happening. Nobody answered him.

Lior is the youngest of the three who remember it properly. He was in that corridor too, he was at the window when the doctor said indefinitely, and he is the only one of the nine who will talk about it in plain words and in front of you — usually badly, usually at the wrong moment, usually while refusing to move out of your way.

he said.

The post slid off his lap and down the stairs, and the whole house was in the hall.