So did the coffee cans of screws he’d sorted, which she could not use and could not throw away, which just sat in the shed being evidence that a careful, patient man had once stood at that bench and made the small orderly preparations of a person who assumed he’d have time to use them.

I lay in the blue room those first nights and I did not yet love Enid, I barely knew her, but I think I began to ache for her before I liked her, because you cannot live inside the shape a marriage leaves behind and not feel the size of what was lost, even secondhand, even as a stranger paying reduced rent to sleep in the middle of it.

I lay in the blue room those first nights listening to the third stair not creak, because I lay very still, and I listened to the enormous quiet of a house built to hold a family and holding instead one old woman and one broke girl who were being careful not to need each other, and I thought: this is temporary.

I thought it with real conviction.