“Family,” he muttered. “Even if the paperwork never said so.”

The man who remembers biscuits

I wrote Roger long after I ventured in his life, and I still can’t tell you the difference—the page or the person.

What I can tell you is that when my daughter called from an airport with a rental car gone sideways, he had a car sorted before I’d finished explaining the problem. He remembered her at seven, climbing his furniture, stealing his biscuits.

Nobody asks a fictional character to remember that kind of thing.

He just does.

To arrivals, and to what follows

Later, glass raised, the house full of people who have no business knowing one another and somehow do, I said the only toast that fit: to arrivals, and to what follows.

Old whiskey, older company. A grand-daughter asleep against someone’s shoulder. The kind of room where you stop trying to sort who belongs to the story and who belongs to the world, and just let them all hold a glass together.

I don’t have an explanation for any of this.

Some nights, I’ve stopped looking for one, I just keep on writing.

Find where this story began — and where the people in it are still arriving from — on Kobo. [Start the series here →]

Author’s Note

Roger was family long before he became a character.

For more than ten years, our lives crossed in the ordinary, irreplaceable ways that make a person part of your history…

Irena Phaedra.