Nobody told me.

I had been in that room for six minutes.

Footsteps in the hall.

And the first thing I noticed — before anything else, before I saw anything — was that they were wrong.

I had listened to that man come into that house for eleven years.

He came in hard.

He dropped keys in the dish.

He said something before he was through the door, every single time, usually hello, once memorably a full sentence about a parking ticket delivered to an empty hall.