Chapter 1 — Empty Rooms

My name is Mortimer Ashland, and I am seventy-four years old.

If anyone had told me three years ago that late in my life I would begin questioning every cup I drank in my own house, every closed door, even the smile of the woman I had placed a wedding ring on with my own hand, I would have laughed.

My first wife, Bess, had died eight years earlier.

We had shared nearly fifty years.

After I lost her I had everything money can name — a beautiful house, investments, the freedom to travel anywhere.

But whenever I came home, no one was waiting.

There were only empty rooms, and the particular silence that a house takes on when the person who made it a home is gone.

I want to describe that silence, because it is the true beginning of this story — not Dulce, but the eight years of quiet that came before her and made me ready for her.

People imagine that a man in my position, with money and health and time, has an enviable life, and from the outside I suppose I did.

But wealth does nothing for the specific loneliness of a long marriage ended by death.

Bess and I had built a whole private language across fifty years, a thousand small routines and jokes and understandings, and when she died all of it died with her and left me the only speaker of a language no one else knew.

I would make a joke at breakfast out of pure habit and then remember there was no one to catch it.

I would reach across the bed in the night.