There was no drama.

There was only the quiet, complete, orderly removal of a life he had assumed would always be there for him to return to, and I am told that the ordinariness of it — the boxes, the storage receipt, the lawyer’s flat courteous prose — was harder for him than any scene could have been, because you cannot rage at good paperwork.

Liesl did not stay.

I bear her no ill will, honestly; she had been promised a house and a lifestyle by a man who turned out to be a sixty-year-old transplant patient with a bag of anti-rejection drugs and no house, and she left, and she was at least honest enough to leave quickly.

Marva said Gregor looked, those weeks, like a man who had walked confidently into a room he’d been in a thousand times and found the floor gone.

I did not enjoy hearing it as much as I expected to.