The rooms are smaller than memory and larger than they should be, all at once.

Our voices echoed.

The marks were everywhere the furniture had stood for fifty years — the pale rectangle where the couch had been, the dents in the carpet, the notches on the pantry doorframe where our mother had measured us every birthday, two children climbing the wood in pencil, higher and higher and then stopping, the way children do, at grown.

Terry ran his thumb over the topmost notch with my name by it.