The first thing Helen did after the funeral was remove the photographs, every last one.

“Mom, please don’t,” Howard begged her, ineffectively, from the doorway. He wasn’t yet accustomed to being the oldest child. “Gwen wouldn’t want you to.”

“Then she can come back and tell me herself,” Helen said, ignoring the look of bewilderment and fear on her son’s face. She took down Gwen’s graduation picture, her baby pictures, every picture of her she could find. Plus all the pictures of George, just for good measure. She threw them into a box, sat down and sobbed.

“Mom, are we gonna move?” Simon asked worriedly. He was playing a video game. He had been doing it non-stop since his sister’s death, barely even pausing to look up.

“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” Helen said wearily. Since her husband had died, she hadn’t felt one iota ike the strong sort of parent. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor do I.”

“We could move to England,” Philip spoke up. “Gwen was gonna move to England.”

Helen wiped her tears away, but it was for the sake of her remaining children rather than because she wanted to. She could have cried forever. “You boys should go and sleep.”

“I have bad dreams,” Simon said, still not taking his eyes off the screen. “I wanna stay awake. S’not like I have school.”

Helen hadn’t thought to arrange a time for her sons going back to school, or even to talk to them about it. George would have remembered, but she wasn’t him.

“Just try to sleep,” she said, and then the doorbell rang. It was eight-thirty in the evening and the building had been quiet all day. The boys all froze.

“It might be a reporter,” Philip said quietly. There had been some at the funeral, circling like bloated vultures. “Should I open it?”

“No. Please don’t.”

“It’s not a reporter,” said Howard, who was nearest. “It’s Spider-Man.”

Simon put down his video game and rushed to the door. Helen dashed after him, convinced that what was behind the door was only danger, convinced that a second child was about to lost to her, filled with the fear and horror and dullness that only bereaved parents know. But Simon pulled the front door open, and nothing happened at all. Spider-Man just stood there, looking at them.

“Boys, get back,” Helen commanded, and they did. “I heard you tried to save my daughter,” she said to the man in the doorway. She hadn’t known what she might say to him if given the chance, until then.

“Yes, m’am,” he said quietly.

“Why didn’t you?” She hadn’t meant to say that.

“I tried,” he told her. “I tried very hard.”

Howard was closest to her and he was shaking. Helen allowed him to step forward and what he said was, in a polite tone, “Come in and sit down, sir, please.”

He sounded exactly like his father. They all traisped through to the living room. Spider-Man didn’t sit down until all the others had.

“Were you at the funeral?” Helen asked him. She hoped she had managed to say it in a gentle tone, that was what she was aiming for, but it was hard to tell.

“No,” Spider-Man said after a pause.

“Why not?” said Philip.

“It wasn’t my place.”

“You tried to save her. You handed her body over the cops. They said you were upset,” Helen said, trying her best to keep her voice steady. “It was your place.”

“Thank you.”

She thought he was probably a reasonably young man, maybe even a teenager. She hated herself for not cutting him any slack, but her husband and her daughter had both died on his watch.

“Boys,” she said, taking a deep breath, “just – just go to your rooms for now. I want to talk to him alone.” And they did, they all got up, Simon even turned off the TV for her. They were such good kids, it made her want to cry. Such good kids and they’d suffered so much already.

“You should be very proud of your sons,” Spider-Man said once they’d gone. “Their sister would be.”

Helen swallowed down the tears, and waited until she heard all the doors close. Then she said, “I need you to tell me honestly, don’t sugarcoat it. Did my Gwen suffer?”

“No,” Spider-Man said, a shake in his voice. “She died as soon as – as soon as she hit the ground.”

“And before? When that – thing, when whatever that thing was picked her up and threw her?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably, and suddenly she felt like she was actually torturing him. She stopped. “I do want to thank you. I know you did everything you could have done.” He just nodded. “You would have been welcome, at the funeral.”

“Thank you. But I thought you had too many unwanted guests there already.”

“You mean the press?” Helen looked away. “I gave a brief interview, to the Bugle. I’m a lawyer, I know how to handle the press. But they’re blaming you.”

Spider-Man just shrugged.

“The papers love it. The death of a teenage girl,” Helen said bitterly. “They all describe her as beautiful, on every page and headline that’s the first word they use. As if that’s all she was. As if that’s the only thing I lost.”

“I know.”

“She was an immensely talented scientist, did you know? Won a scholarship to Oxford.” Spider-Man nodded. “They’re thinking of renaming the scholarship after her, did you know? The kid it went to with her gone, he came round here too, almost crying. Lovely kid. Miles, his name was. Only fourteen. Gwen would have liked him.” Helen swiped at her face once more. “Did you know my daughter? Actually know her? I think she’d have liked you, too.”

“No,” said Spider-Man quietly. “I didn’t know her. But you’re right. I would have liked her.”

Helen stared off into the distance. “Her favourite TV show was Doctor Who. Her favourite band were the Beatles. She was a bit of an Anglophile, actually. A few years ago she used up her entire allowance buying posters of that one guy, Benedict whoever, it was ridiculous.” She blinked back her tears. “When Howard was failing chemistry she tutored him every night. When Philip was being bullied by the kid next door, she went around and threatened him and he never did it again. When Simon got appendicitis and was rushed to hospital-” she was crying now- “she ran right across town from school, just to see him, and stayed there all day.” She put her head on the table and wept into her hands. Spider-Man was still there when she looked up. “I put all her pictures in this box. I can’t bear to look at them.”

“What did Howard, Philip and Simon think about that?”

“I don’t know. I’ll put them back up. I just…I couldn’t stand it.” She wiped her face with her sleeve, leaving a long streak of mascara there. The shirt she was wearing had been very expensive, but it had been the same shirt she had worn to the funeral, and she had no desire whatsoever to wear it again. “I thought you should know those things. No-one else really cares. She was nineteen!”

“I know.”

Helen listened for the sounds that would reassure her her other three children were safe in their rooms, as she waited for her tears to dry. “Gwen had a boyfriend, you know. Peter Parker. Have you visited him? I haven’t seen him. I don’t know how he’s doing.”

“I’ll try to see him.”

“Good.”

Both of them stared at the box. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Helen had put all the photos in face-down, and nothing could be seen.

“Do you visit the families of everyone you don’t – can’t save?” Helen asked. “You were there when my husband died, too. Do you?”

“Sometimes.” She thought that might be the only answer she’d get about that, so she tried another. “What do your friends and family think of you doing this? Being what you are?”

“Almost all my friends and family are dead.”

She should have expected that. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry.”

Spider-Man stood up from where he’d been sitting, and she did too. He went to the door, the same way he’d come in, like a normal person.

“My boys were glad to see you,” Helen said. “So was I.”

“Thank you,” he said, although she wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was thanking her for. With one hand on the door handle he said, “She was a talented scientist. The best one I’ve ever known. That’s why – that’s how I knew her. She helped me defeat the man who was holding the whole city ransom. I couldn’t have done it without her, I couldn’t even have begun. She saved thousands of people, maybe millions. Remember that.”

Helen knew she would remember it for the the rest of her life, that her other children and their children and probably even their children would remember it. “I will.”

He nodded at her, and she thought she could picture his expression under the mask, and then he opened the door and was gone. Helen walked to the box of photographs, and called for her sons, and they started putting the pictures back on the wall.