But it was, I understood later, the first thing she ever taught me about her house, and she taught it to me the way she taught me everything, which was as a rule that turned out, if you stayed long enough to see it, to be a kindness in a hard coat.

Chapter 4 — The Blue Room

For the first few weeks we lived around each other like two cats assigned the same apartment, elaborately polite, deeply wary, each of us keeping a careful ledger of the other’s encroachments.

The house was full of a man I never met.

Albert Kirkland had been dead four years, and he was everywhere — in the chair, in the shed full of labeled coffee cans of sorted screws, in the reading glasses still on the hall table, in the way Enid set two cups down at the coffee pot every single morning and then, catching herself, put one back.

I learned him in pieces, the way you learn a person from their absence.