Instead of driving back to the city right away, Grace and I stayed in Ohio for the rest of the summer.

We did not decide it all at once; we simply kept not leaving, one week folding into the next, and the house that had felt so cold and hostile the afternoon we arrived slowly, day by day, filled up with something else.

It filled with the smell of my mother’s cooking, which I had not tasted in ten years and which brought the past back in a rush every time.

It filled with Grace’s laughter, ringing through rooms that had stood silent for far too long, waking something in the old house that had been asleep for a decade.