The conversations around the big dinner table were always about selling Black Elm and became more urgent as the neighborhood around the old house began to come back to life. A sculptor from New York had bought up a run-down old home for a dollar, demolished it, and built a vast open-space studio for her work. She’d convinced her friends to follow, and Westville had suddenly started to feel fashionable.

“This is the time to sell,” his father would say. “When the land is finally worth something.”

“You know what this town is like,” his mother said. This town. “It won’t last.”

“We don’t need this much space. It’s going to waste; the upkeep alone costs a fortune. Come to New York. We could see you more often. We could get you into a doorman building or you could move someplace warm. Danny could go to Dalton or board at Exeter.”

His grandfather would say, “Private schools turn out pussies. I’m not making that mistake again.”

Danny’s father had gone to Exeter.

Sometimes Danny thought his grandfather liked toying with the Layabouts. He would examine the scotch in his glass, lean back, prop his feet by the fire if it was winter, contemplate the green cloud formations of the elm trees that loomed over the back garden in the summer. He would seem to think on it. He would debate the better places to live, the upside to Westport, the downside to Manhattan. He’d expound on the new condominiums going up by the old brewery, and Danny’s parents would follow wherever his fancies led, eagerly, hopefully, trying to build a new rapport with the old fellow.

The first night of their visits always ended with I’ll think on it, his father’s cheeks rosy with liquor, his mother gamely clutching her cocoon of plush cashmere around her shoulders. But by the close of day two the Layabouts would start to get restless, irritable. They’d push a little harder and his grandfather would start to push back. By the third night, they were arguing, the fire in the grate sparking and smoking when no one remembered to add another log.

For a long time Danny wondered why his grandfather kept playing this game. It wasn’t until he was much older, when his grandfather was gone, and Danny was alone in the dark towers of Black Elm, that he realized his grandfather had been lonely, that his routine of the diner and collecting rents and reading Kipling might not be enough to fill the dark at the end of the day, that he might miss his foolish son. It was only then, lying on his side in the empty house, surrounded by a nest of books, that Darlington understood how much Black Elm demanded and how little it gave back.

The Layabouts’ visits always ended the same way: his parents departing in a flurry of indignation and the scent of his mother’s perfume—Caron Poivre, Darlington had learned on a fateful night in Paris the summer after sophomore year, when he’d finally worked up the courage to ask Angelique Brun for a date and arrived at her door to her looking glorious in black satin, her pulse points daubed with the expensive stink of his miserable youth. He’d claimed a migraine and cut the evening short.

Danny’s parents had insisted they would take Danny away, that they’d enroll him in private school, that they’d bring him back to New York with them. At first Danny had been thrilled and panicked by these threats. But soon he’d come to understand they were empty blows aimed at his grandfather. His parents couldn’t afford expensive schools without Arlington money, and they didn’t want a child interfering with their freedom.

Once the Layabouts had gone, Danny and his grandfather would go to dinner at Clark’s and his grandfather would sit and talk with Tony about his kids and look at family photos and they’d extoll the value of “good, honest work” and then his grandfather would grab Danny’s wrist.

“Listen,” he would say, his eyes rheumy and wet when you looked this close. “Listen. They’ll try to take the house when I die. They’ll try to take it all. You don’t let them.”

“You’re not going to die,” Danny would say.

And his grandfather would wink and laugh and reply, “Not yet.” Once, installed in a red booth, the smell of hash browns and steak sauce thick in the air, Danny had dared to ask, “Why did they even have me?”

“They liked the idea of being parents,” his grandfather said, waving his hand over the leavings of his dinner. “Showing you off to their friends.”

“And then they just dumped me here?”

“I didn’t want you raised by nannies. I told them I’d buy them an apartment in New York City if they left you with me.”

That had seemed okay to Danny at the time, because his grandfather knew best, because his grandfather had worked for a living. And if maybe some part of him wondered if the old man had just wanted another shot at raising a son, had cared more about the Arlington line than what might be best for a lonely little boy, the rest of him knew better than to walk down that dark hall.

As Danny got older, he made it a point to be out of the house when the Layabouts came to town. He was embarrassed by the idea of hanging around, hoping for a gift or a sign of interest in his life. He’d grown tired of watching them play out the same drama with his grandfather and seeing them indulged.

“Why don’t you leave the old man alone and go back to wasting your time and his money?” he sneered at them on his way out of the house.

“When did the little prince become so pious?” his father had retorted. “You’ll know what it’s like when you fall out of favor.”

But Darlington never had the chance. His grandfather got sick. His doctor told him to stop smoking, change the way he ate, said he could buy himself a few more months, maybe even a year. Danny’s grandfather refused. He would have things his way or not at all. A nurse was hired to live in the house. Daniel Tabor Arlington grew grayer and more frail.

The Layabouts came to stay, and suddenly Black Elm felt like enemy territory. The kitchen was full of his mother’s special foods, stacks of plastic containers, little bags of grains and nuts that crowded the counters. His father was constantly pacing through the ground-floor rooms, talking on his cell phone—about getting the house assessed, probate law, tax law. Bernadette was banished in favor of a cleaning crew that appeared twice a week in a dark green van and used only organic products.

Danny spent most of his time at the museum or in his room with the door locked, lost in books he consumed like a flame eating air, trying to stay alight. He practiced his Greek, started teaching himself Portuguese.

His grandfather’s bedroom was crowded with equipment—IVs to keep him hydrated, oxygen to keep him breathing, a hospital bed beside the huge four-poster to keep him elevated. It looked like a time traveler from the future had taken over the dim space.

Whenever Danny tried to talk to his grandfather about what his parents were doing, about the real estate agent who had come to walk the property, his grandfather would seize his wrist and glance meaningfully at the nurse. “She listens,” he hissed.

And maybe she did. Darlington was fifteen years old. He didn’t know how much of what his grandfather said was true, if the cancer was speaking or the drugs.

“They’re keeping me alive so they can control the estate, Danny.”

“But your lawyer—”

“You think they can’t make him promises? Let me die, Danny.

They’ll bleed Black Elm dry.”

Danny went out alone to sit at the counter at Clark’s, and when Leona had set a dish of ice cream in front of him, he’d had to press the heels of his hands against his eyes to keep from crying. He’d sat there until they needed to close and only then taken the bus home.

The next day, they found his grandfather cold in his bed. He’d slipped into a coma and could not be revived. There were furious, whispered conversations, closed doors, his father yelling at the nurse.

Danny had spent his days at the Peabody Museum. The staff didn’t mind. There was a whole herd of kids who got dumped there during the summers. He’d walked through the mineral room; communed with the mummy, and the giant squid, and Crichton’s raptor; tried to redraw the reptile mural. He walked the Yale campus, spent hours deciphering the different languages above the Sterling Library doors, was drawn again and again to the Beinecke’s collection of tarot cards, to the impenetrable Voynich Manuscript. Staring at its pages was like standing at Lighthouse Point all over again, waiting for the world to reveal itself.

When it started to get dark, he took the bus home and crept in through the garden doors, moving silently through the house, retreating to his bedroom and his books. Ordinary subjects weren’t enough anymore. He was too old to believe in magic, but he needed to believe that there was something more to the world than living and dying. So he called his need an interest in the occult, the arcane, sacred objects. He spent his time hunting down the work of alchemists and spiritualists who had promised ways of looking into the unseen. All he needed was a glimpse, something to sustain him.