The house had been a container.

Now Terry and I were the containers.

That is what it means to be the ones left: not that you have lost the people, but that you have become the place they are kept.

We walked through every room.

We touched the pencil notches on the pantry frame.

We stood a while in the two small bedrooms that had been ours, that would be some new child’s now, and we did not say much, and we did not have to, because the whole point of standing there together was that for the first time in the emptying I was not doing it alone and neither was he.

Then we walked out the back door, and Terry locked it, and I bent down and lifted the concrete frog, and I held the spare key in my hand for a moment — the key that had let me into every version of this house my whole life — and then I put it in my pocket.