The library curtains were open and pale winter light lay across the rug.

My father’s leather chair was where it had always been beside the fireplace, his reading glasses still in the little tray on the side table where nobody had dared move them in three years.

I had always assumed she left them because she missed him.

Standing there, I wondered whether some objects stay untouched because moving them means admitting the conversation attached to them never happened.

Kelsey noticed the chair too.