So I stayed. When, finally, he turned to me and said he was going to sleep, that I was welcome to join him, I obliged. The bed was comfortable. I felt at ease. He wrapped himself around me and then unraveled himself as he fell deeper into unconsciousness. I lay awake, noticing the outlines of the sparse furniture in the dark, but soon sleep took me, too.

I woke up the next morning alone in the bed, the sun drenching the sheets and pillows, my naked body. I watched shadows flit across my exposed torso, tore off the covers and felt the prickle of my hair standing on end as my body cooled down. I liked it there, without him, for the moment. It didn’t occur to me to wonder where he’d gone and I didn’t hear any noise from the bathroom, so I continued to stretch like a cat.

In the daylight the room appeared even more opulent and expertly designed. The bed’s headboard, I noticed, was kelly green and plush velvet, the bedposts carved with an interlacing floral design, crawling up like ivy from the bed. The walls were painted an almost unsettling white, so bright and clean that it was an anomaly that anyone lived there. I guessed he had staff, people to come in every day to scrub the dirt off, repaint as needed.

I stood up, noticing the angora rug, as white as the walls, covering the floor at the foot of the bed. It felt so good on my bare feet, the softness seeping in between my toes. I could roll around on that and be happy, I thought, wrap it up and wear it as a shawl.

The only other pieces of furniture in the room were the vanity and screen I’d noticed the previous night. The vanity was huge, with a three-paneled mirror, clusters of brushes all organized by usage and height in various cases and jars. On the maplewood tabletop sat a perfume flask, purple crystal. I spritzed some on my wrist, inhaled the lavender scent. I pulled open one drawer, was met with a tray of lipstick in every shade of red imaginable, organized from the brightest to darkest.

I gently closed the drawer, tempted suddenly to go look into the closets located on the far side of the room, their handles big and bronze, incised ornamentally like the headboard. But that seemed like too much of an invasion, to go into another person’s closet. I didn’t want to know what his wife wore, what her sense of style was like. After sleeping in what used to be her bed, entwined in her sheets.

I stepped outside the room and opened the door just to the right.