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The dining room was long and gold-lit. The table took up most of it, crowded with dishes under foil, glasses, and people. The woman with the casserole from the hallway, Claire, was now seated and not looking at them. A younger woman who had to be Sophie was telling Sally to sit still, and Jonah was dropping into his seat with the dish towel still draped over his shoulder.

And at the far end sat a big man in a golf shirt with a box of wine stationed beside his glass.

“Well, well,” the man said, lifting his glass an inch. “Look what the ghost dragged in.”

He was clearly delighted with this turn of phrase, looking around the table to see if it had landed.

“Uncle Richard,” Nate said. There was no warmth in the greeting.

“What’s it been — two years? Three? Nice to know something can get you to a family dinner.” The man’s gaze came down the table to the seal. “So this is it, then. The famous seal.”

“Richard,” Miriam said, “this is Leo. Leo — my brother Richard, my sister Claire, and Sophie, and you’ve met the children, Sally and Nicky.”

“It talks?” Richard leaned forward to peer down the table.

“Not to you,” the ghost said in defiance.

He did not like this man. He did not like him at all.

“He talks,” Jonah spoke over him, grinning. “Even I can hear him.”

“Here,” Miriam said, and set him down on a chair with a cushion on it to bring him up to table height. In front of him was a plate. A real plate, from the set everyone else had, with a fork and a knife beside it that he could not lift and a napkin folded into a fan that he could not unfold, and propped against the water glass he could not drink from, a small rectangle of paper.

Someone had made a place card.

It was done in crayon, in enormous wobbling capitals, each letter a different color, and it said:

SEEL GOST

“I made it,” Sally said, from directly beside him. She had claimed the neighboring chair before her mother could stop her. “I didn’t know your name. I can make a new one.”

The ghost looked at the card.

“It’s fine,” he said, trying very hard not to sound as shaken as he felt.

Sally turned to her mother. “What did he say?”

“He said it’s fine,” Nate said, taking the chair on the ghost’s other side. “He likes it.”

Sally beamed and knelt back down on her chair, satisfied, and the table erupted into the business of dinner. Plates were filled and water passed around. Richard refilled his wine from a box.

The ghost sat behind his empty plate and watched.

The food smelled extraordinary. Meat and the onions and butter. He remembered those smells even though he could not recall his last meal.

“So,” Sophie said, cutting food into pieces on Nicky’s plate. “I heard something about a fox?”

“A FOX ATE HIM,” Sally yelled with an unwarranted amount of enthusiasm.

The ghost bristled. “I was not eaten!”

“A fox took the seal off the porch,” Nate said. “I got him back. That’s the whole story.”

“That is not the whole story,” the ghost protested.

“He says that’s not the whole story,” Jonah reported, delighted, and the table turned toward the seal.

The ghost drew himself up as far as the cushion allowed.