Hearing in New York City that his seventeen-year-old nephew Billy, his sister Daphney's oldest child, was dying of cancer in Barbados, Neville shut himself in his bedroom and assumed he was lying on Billy's bed in the old family house so that Daphney would see her brother and not her son; ten days later a letter came from Daphney describing exactly that, at the matching day and hour. Billy died, but Neville had convinced her that her son was not flesh and blood.