For a long time, at the beginning, the box was in every room.

It was under every ordinary moment.

I would be making the boys’ breakfast and the smell of the coffee would somehow become the smell of varnish and cold soil and I would have to grip the counter and breathe until the kitchen came back.

Wyatt would wake screaming and I would run to him and hold him and we would sit up together in the lamplight until the dark stopped being the dark of the box and became again just the ordinary dark of a bedroom at night.

It got better the way the tide goes out — not all at once, and not without moments where it seemed to come rushing back in, but overall, over months, receding, leaving more and more dry ground where we could stand.