Walking into it was like walking into the past.

I had told myself, for six years, that I kept the study untouched out of simple inertia, that I had more important things to do than redecorate a dead man’s room.

The truth, which I only admitted to myself standing in it that night, was that some part of me had not finished with him.

A boy raised by a man like my father spends his whole life waiting for a conversation that the father is too hard, and then too dead, to have.

I had kept the room the way you keep a phone number you will never call, because throwing it away would be admitting the call will never come.