Saturday morning in an empty house. Gradually over the past several years, but chronically it seemed in the last few months, Hardy wasn’t happy at home. Kids constantly underfoot, Frannie with her women friends, talking about kids mostly. Kids fighting, discipline. Kids’ sports, games, school, homework, lessons, meals they didn’t eat, pets they didn’t care for. Kids kids kids.

Whenever anyone asked him directly, he always said he loved his own kids, and he thought he did. But if he had it to do over, being honest with himself, he had doubts.

When they’d started out, Frannie and he had read all the books about marriages coping with the changes of a growing family. Hardy had often wondered since why somebody hadn’t written the real book, called ‘Children? Don’t!’ Because he’d come to believe that having a family didn’t simply change things – it ended that earlier existence. You might go into it thinking you were retaining the essentials of the old life, merely adding to its richness and variety. But in a few years you had a whole new life, and it felt as if none of it was really yours.

He’d come around to accepting as absolute fact that paradise would be sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to an empty, quiet house. Maybe one that would stay that way.

Now, doing it, suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

The sun was in his eyes. He threw a forearm over them, then squinted out his bedroom window over the city. Where was he, anyway? It came back to him – he’d slept in his clothes, crashing on the bed. The gun was on his reading table, where the clock read eight thirty. He must have been a zombie on wheels. He didn’t remember anything about driving home, where he’d parked, letting himself in.

God, it was quiet.

Bones creaking, he forced himself to sit up, saw the gun and reached for it.

He got up and went into the bathroom, throwing cold water on his face, trying to wake all the way up. Through the rooms, then to the front door, which he’d locked, then back down the long hallway to the kitchen. The house felt hollow, as though the soul of it had been sucked out. The kids, he realized. Frannie.

It struck him forcibly – a revelation. Standing by his sturdy, rough-hewn table in a well-equipped and beautiful kitchen on a fantastic Indian summer morning, he felt nothing but an underlying sense of terror, a vast pervasive unease.

This was the alternative.

But he had work to do, and yesterday had been a reminder that the engine wouldn’t work without fuel. His black and ancient cast-iron pan was in its place on the back burner. No matter what he cooked in it, nothing ever stuck. He cleaned it only with salt and a wipe with a rag. Since Hardy had first cured it, the pan had never known detergent or water, and now its surface was a flat black pearl.

Turning the gas on under it, he threw down a thin layer of salt from the shaker, then crossed to the refrigerator. He grabbed a couple of eggs. Evidently Frannie had been marinating filet mignons for Thursday night when the grand jury session had intervened. Hardy picked one of the steaks from its ceramic bowl and dropped it into the pan, then broke an egg on either side of it.

There was a loaf of sourdough in its bag by the bread drawer and he sliced off about a third of it, cut it down the middle, poured some olive oil on to one of the cut sides, and placed it next to the sizzling steak.

While everything cooked on one side, he put on a pot of coffee, then turned the bread and the meat, laid the eggs on the toasted side, broke the yolks, turned off the pan, and went in to shower.

The day, when he hit the street outside, was impossibly bright, warm, and fragrant. He felt hopeful and motivated, a far cry from how he’d woken up, when he couldn’t figure out a move and then – unable to focus – hadn’t been able to locate his car for ten minutes.

But running on automatic, he knew that whatever else he did he had to go to Erin’s first, to check in and see Vincent and Rebecca, make sure they were getting along all right at their grandmother’s. And that visit had provided him with a bonus as well as the usual territorial disputes.

Last night Ed and Erin had taken them to the Planetarium and they were telling him about all they had learned, and the cool way the night sky came up. Vincent didn’t believe it was an optical illusion. He was sure it was the real night sky. ‘It was. It was exactly the sky, Dad. They just opened the roof and there was the moon and the stars and everything.’ Shooting a glare at Rebecca the literalist, daring her to contradict him.

But Hardy cut them off. ‘I’ve seen it, too, Vin. It is the exact sky. I love that, too.’ A warning eye at his girl – don’t say anything. Let him have this one.

Finally he got to her. ‘So, Beck, what’d you see?’

His daughter, always ready to show off a fact, no longer cared about the truth of the night sky. Her father had finessed Vincent and given her the floor and that was all that mattered. ‘Well, the main thing was about, what’s that moon, Vin?’

‘I don’t know, but around Jup-’

‘Yeah, that’s it. Around Jupiter, one of the moons has an atmosphere and water and everything you need for life.’

‘What about heat?’

‘Inside, Dad. Molten core and volcanoes. Just like a mile under the ocean here on earth. Where’s the heat there? Inside. See?’

‘Great. I bet it could happen.’

‘Definitely. They even showed what could grow as if we were there. Some of them-’

‘You know what I thought was the best thing?’ Vincent had to get a word in.

‘The Beck’s not done, Vin. One more-’

‘She’ll never get done. She’ll keep going till you have to go.’

Hardy thought of a new name for his ‘don’t have that child’ book – The Endless Referee. But he sighed. ‘Beck? Are you almost done?’

But she must have been truly happy to have her dad there, or else wanted nothing more than to please him, which did happen. She hesitated only a second before smiling. ‘He can go.’

‘OK, Vin, what did you think was the best thing?’

The boy was so thrilled with his good fortune – interrupting his sister and it worked! – that for a moment Hardy thought he’d forgotten what he was going to say. This happened all the time, and invariably made Vincent cry. But it was, suddenly, a morning for miracles. The fact had come back to him. ‘How you can see a star when you can’t see it?’

It must have been obvious that Hardy didn’t understand.

Vincent tried it another way. ‘When it’s too dim, when you can’t see it otherwise.’

‘What is?’

‘A star, or a planet, or anything in the sky. If it’s really dim, the way you see it is you don’t look right at it. You look to the side. We did it. It really works.’

So when Hardy left, his next stop wasn’t Frannie or Abe or his reporter friend Jeff Elliot to catch up on the Beaumont case.

At his son’s suggestion, he wasn’t going to look directly at it for a while. He still had clients and phone messages and paperwork so he went to his office to attend to those.

And sure enough, somewhere in the middle of that, he remembered that Phil Canetta had stood behind him with his spiral pocket filing system, and he’d written down all the names on Ron’s answering machine.

He had told Hardy he worked out of Central Station, so he looked up the number and made the call.

The Central Station, close to the border of Chinatown and North Beach, was where Hardy wanted to open his restaurant when he retired. Not that there weren’t dozens of other fantastic dining establishments within a couple of blocks – Firenze by Night, Amelio’s, Rose Pistola, the North Beach Restaurant, Caffe Sport, the Gold Spike – but the smells of coffee, breads, licorice, sesame, roasted duck, cheeses, fish, and sausages kept tourists in a near constant feeding frenzy.