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Before meeting Sophie that day, I’d spent the afternoon touring the bookshops. In every single one, I’d picked a book that shared a shelf with Cupid’s Engine, pulled it out, then posted it over the top of the others, so that it dropped with a thunk into the dark, hidden space at the back of the shelf. I’d been doing this for years and usually I chose a Borges to take the fall, if one was available. I’d always thought that he, of all writers, wouldn’t mind it so very much. Anyway, with a single book removed like this, there’s more room on the shelf. I would use this room to create a book-sized gap between Cupid’s Engine and the next book along to the right. It’d become a ritual over time, I suppose. In every bookshop I went to, I’d make a book-sized space, a gap big enough for Andrew Black’s second novel. I don’t know why I started it. Maybe I thought that one of us – Andrew, me, my father – had to publish something. Time’s arrow had to keep making us a past, present and future, and as my father wouldn’t be writing anything else – oh, I don’t know. For years, I made those gaps in every bookshop all over London, even after I became sure that a second Andrew Black book would never come. Recently, I think I’ve come to understand that creating those spaces was less about the giving of room, and more about the recognition of a hole.