She looked around the great dark office, at the expensive, joyless weight of it.

“So I took the job,” she said.

“I thought I’d stay a few weeks, see the house, see the family, satisfy the question, and leave.

I never meant to still be here six months later.

I certainly never meant to love anyone in this house.

She said it as though it were a failure, a breach of the plan she had come in with.

And perhaps, by the cold logic I lived by, it was.