“I guess we could try it out,” he said.

Heidi smiled. “A new chapter for you. A new chapter for me.”

A week passed, then two. Cliff hadn’t seen Jill, but this wasn’t a bad thing. He wanted to be better before he saw her—enrolled in classes for the coming winter, ready for school.

Most mornings, he and Heidi converged in the kitchen for breakfast. She would stare dreamily out the window as she stirred molasses into her oatmeal, a daily ritual Cliff had come to anticipate, as certain as the sunrise or the steam whistle blowing from the university, which sat on top of the town’s largest hill. He would spread peanut butter on toast, drink coffee, and scan the paper for a better job. He’d picked up a couple shifts at an Italian restaurant downtown, but he didn’t much like it. His clothes perpetually stank of marinara sauce, and one of the dishwashers, a townie named Rico, kept finding surreptitious ways to touch Cliff’s butt.

“How’s the room working out?” Heidi asked one morning. Students could be heard outside, walking or biking to class. They seemed, always, to be shouting.

“The room’s fine,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”

She looked relieved. “You wouldn’t believe how many people turned it down. I tried everything. Added hard wood. Changed the curtains. And the paint. I changed the paint a few times and still nobody took it.”

“I’m not sure why. It’s a good room.”

“Well,” she said, smiling to herself. “I’m glad you like it.”

The room was, in fact, perfectly fine. It had everything Cliff needed: a queen bed and a modest desk where he’d stashed the few postcards Jill had sent him during the short time when she’d been in school and he at the lodge. The curtains did look new. They were a dark blue, made of a thick, silky material that kept the light out in the morning.

Cliff wondered if it was not the room but Heidi herself that had kept tenants away. There was something unsettling about her—a kind of puppy dog eagerness that made him feel that she might, at any moment, set herself in his lap and demand to be petted. In the mornings, she refilled his coffee without his asking, as if she was his waitress. At night, like clockwork, she appeared at his door with a cup of chamomile tea. When he finally admitted to not liking tea, she arrived with hot cocoa and thin lemon cookies that melted on his tongue. The problem was not the coffee or the cookies, but the conversations they inspired. She would ask him questions—How was his day? Was he liking Kansas? Had he tried any of the pie she left in the fridge?—and so long as there was a mug in his hand, he was obligated to answer.

“You know, your room used to be my husband’s study,” Heidi was saying. “He’d hole up in there for days, writing and writing, and then sneak out at night, like a little mouse, to steal food from the kitchen. That was how he had to write his books—he said it was the only way. Total isolation. This was back when our son was in the house. You can imagine how it made him feel.”