“Oh no.” She smiled. “I just came in at the end and dressed it up a little. I like interiors. I’m not artistic. Not at all. But I’m good at sewing.” I knew if I tried to speak again I would cry. “They didn’t let you take photographs indoors. I took notes, and there were some pictures online. We got the colors pretty close. Didn’t we, Robin?” They exchanged a glance of the kind nurses exchange over a patient’s head.

“The staircase still needs to be built. I thought I would just go ahead and get everything else done while you were away.” He was talking rapidly. “Instead of, you know, waiting.”

“You mean I’m no good at making decisions these days?”

“Obviously change it around!” Norma rushed to say. “If you don’t like anything. It’s yours.”

Shame kept me from meeting her eye. My cagey performance on the dock and on her picnic bench, my mission to conceal and disclose my anguish. Why had she bothered? Why make soft furnishings for a dream room for someone you barely know? People did irrational things; people did all kinds of extraordinary things. Walter and Rose were in on it too. Built by my father as a cabin-in-the-woods, the house had been enlarged, redesigned, and improved on for forty years. The attic would be the last refinement.

“I like it,” I said. “I love it.” The uselessness of words!

Joy would have been on Maddy’s face had she stood where we were standing. Maybe the others were furtively noticing and tactfully ignoring whatever was on my face now. The room had the melancholy of fires and aquariums and libraries and late afternoons; that could not be helped, but there were riches too, beyond the melancholy, or hidden deep inside it.

It was too intimate, the three of us standing together in this space they had made for me. I went over and picked up a cushion in a geometric design of blue, red, and black, studied the fine overstitching along the border; put it down; stroked the heathery weave of a throw; touched the deep red cushions and the wall hangings, edged like vestments with gold.

The bookcase held a few paperbacks. Propped on one of the shelves was a small frame. I picked it up: a black-and-white photograph of Maddy, aged seven. At the time her hair had been a close-fitting cap like mine was now. Her hands were tucked in the pockets of her denim jacket. She gazed out of the frame at we who were assembled in the room that would never be hers, with an expression that was tolerant and childish and quizzical and humorous, made from all the tones of photographic gray. I live here now.

Downstairs the others crashed in, stamping and barking, in high spirits from the cold.

•  •  •