The Norfolk's veranda bar at four in the afternoon was the loneliest place Spencer Dutton knew, which was why he used it.

The hunting crowd came at six and got loud by eight, and by then he was usually gone or too far into a bottle to be worth talking to. But four was empty. Four was the boy sweeping the tiles, and the fans turning slow overhead, and the jacarandas dropping purple on the street outside, and a whiskey that a man could sit with and not have to explain to anyone.

He had a scar on his shoulder that was ten days old and doing badly. A leopard up near Nanyuki had come out of a fever tree at him with no warning at all, and he'd got the muzzle up in time and not much else. The surgeon in Nyeri had stitched it and told him to rest a month, and Spencer had thanked him and taken a contract three days later, because rest was a thing that had never once worked on him.

The clerk brought the post over on a salver, like it was a drink. That was the Norfolk for you.

Three items. A bill from a gunsmith in Mombasa. A note from a district officer with a hyena problem and no money. And a letter, much travelled — forwarded twice, the address crossed out and rewritten in two different hands, the envelope soft as cloth from the number of pockets and bags it had lived in. The stamp was American. The writing on it was small and upright and he knew it before he'd finished registering that he knew it.

Cara.

He looked at it for a while. He turned it over and set it on the table and put his glass beside it and looked at that too.

His aunt didn't write to say hello. She wrote like a woman throwing a rope, and every letter she had ever sent him had found him eventually, no matter how far he'd gone or how thoroughly he'd arranged not to be found. He had four of them in a tin in his room upstairs, all of them soft at the folds. He had answered one.

He opened it.

He read it standing up, which he had not intended to do, and he read it a second time sitting down, and then he set it flat on the table and put one hand over his mouth and stayed like that a while with his eyes on the middle distance and nothing at all moving in his face.

Your uncle was shot. He lives, though I don't know for how long or what of him will come back.

Your brother John is dead. He was killed in the road.

There is a war on this land now and there is no one left to fight it.

Come home, Spencer.

There was more. There was a good deal more, and it was all of it plain and unadorned and written by a woman who had not allowed herself the luxury of falling apart on the page. At the bottom, in the same upright hand, without underlining, without a single word wasted:

Come home or we lose everything.

The date at the top of the page was two months and eleven days old.

He sat with it. The fans turned. The boy swept. Out in the street a lorry ground its gears and a man shouted something in Kikuyu and somebody laughed, and the whole world went on being four o'clock in Nairobi, and Spencer Dutton sat perfectly still while the six years he'd built came apart in his hands like wet paper.

He had told himself a story out here. He'd been telling it so long he'd stopped hearing it. The story was that he was no use to anybody, that the war had taken whatever part of a man makes him fit for a family, that he was better off working the edges of the map where the only thing he could ruin was himself. It was a good story. It had let him drink and hunt and sleep on the ground and not think about a valley in Montana with his mother's people in it.

And the story had one flaw in it, which was that it had never been true, and Cara had just written the fact down and posted it four thousand miles.

John was dead. John, who had taught him to sit a horse. Dead two months while Spencer was drinking on a veranda and getting himself opened up by a leopard for money.

He folded the letter along its old creases. His hands were steady. That was the thing about him that people got wrong — his hands were always steady, and it never meant a thing.