I took them down in the first house within a week of moving in and I never put any up again, and I told myself for about eighteen months that this was for her.

It was not for her.

She never asked.

She never once mentioned it.

In the second year Dr.

Sesay asked me, in the flat way she asks things, why a man who lives in Texas has no window coverings in a west-facing room, and I gave her about four minutes of explanation, and at the end of it she said: “Whose is that?”

And then, last spring, Wren turned thirteen.