I went into the bathroom and groaned. I’d gotten tomato on my face, too. “I look like I was in a massacre,” I said.

“Why don’t you wash up? I’ll look around and make sure we didn’t miss anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“Thanks.”

I closed the bathroom door and turned on the shower. I got undressed, and as I pulled my T-shirt over my head, I realize I’d somehow gotten tomatoes in my hair. I carefully extracted myself from my shirt and stepped into the spray.

I realized, at that moment, that I was alone in the house with Steph. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t known that before, but I’d been so focused on Analemma and cleaning up that it hadn’t entirely registered with me. I was alone in the house with Steph. I was naked in the shower, and she was outside in the living room. It was the middle of the night. She had to go home to her girlfriend, and the only reason she was here was because my grandmother had had a stroke, and in a few hours my aunt and my father would arrive.

Tonight we were alone here, together. I had been tired when I stepped into the shower, but I wasn’t tired anymore.

When I finished, I carefully dried myself off, rubbing the towel over my wet hair and combing it back from my face. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bright, my skin pink from the hot water. I hadn’t brought clean clothes into the bathroom with me, so I wrapped the damp towel around myself and opened the door.

Steph was sitting on the couch looking at Joan’s catalog, open on the coffee table in front of her. She had her back to me and didn’t seem to notice that I’d come out of the bathroom. I told myself I should go put some clothes on, but there was something about the posture of Steph’s shoulders, a vulnerability, that made me go over to her.

The catalog was open to one of Joan’s self-portraits. She was sitting in a seventies-era kitchen with my dad on her lap. By the year in the caption, he must have been around three. She was holding on to him while he tried to squirm away from her, his legs kicking out in a blur. But her eyes were steady as she gazed at the camera. Behind her I noticed an old-fashioned wall clock, centered like a sun above her head. It was three o’clock exactly.