Cliff didn’t know what to say. He remembered Jill talking about an ex-boyfriend. She hadn’t said much about him, only that he had broken her heart, that he was good at tennis.

Behind him, a car was pulling up to the house. Cliff turned to see a man get out of the car. He was tall, with a beard and reflective sunglasses. He wore a chambray shirt and leather boots—he could have been anyone in town.

Cliff looked back to Jill, who was trying to keep from smiling. She bit her lip and looked from the man back to Cliff, and then back to the man.

“Jill,” Cliff said.

“I told you,” she said, speaking through her teeth so that the other man would not hear. “I told you I was expecting someone.”

To his relief, Heidi was not home. Cliff went straight to his bedroom, where he sat on the bed and reconsidered the room in light of the new information: the curtains, the hard wood, the paint. He wondered if remodeling had been painful for Heidi, or whether it had afforded her a kind of liberation, to erase the most intimate part of her husband’s life—the place where he had lived and written, the place where he had hidden from her. The place where Cliff now hid from her.

He did not know what to do with himself, in the sense of the short term or the long term. He did not like his job or the town and he did not, at the moment, like himself. And what about Heidi? And the room? And school? He tried to figure what it meant for him, what his next move should be. He thought about researching the dead professor but then decided against it. He wondered if he should apply to another seasonal job, somewhere he’d never been. Maybe Big Bend? He knew people who worked there; the housing and food were not good, but the weather was mild. There would not be snow.

Heidi returned home and broke his train of thought. “Cliff?” she called. “You home?”

Cliff held his breath, unsure whether to answer. “Yes,” he finally said, and came out into the hall where he saw her standing with a black-and-white kitten in her arms.

“I found her on my way home from the library. Isn’t she sweet?” She petted the cat and then placed it on the ground, where it sniffed her shoe before making its way down the hall, cautiously, toward Cliff.

Cliff lifted the kitten. He saw that it had fleas, along with a rather painful looking bald patch behind its ear. “Heidi,” he said, holding out the cat. “It’s got fleas. Maybe you should keep it outside until you can take it to the vet?”

“But she’ll run away. And I want to keep her.”

“She’s sick, you can see it.”

“I’ll take her to the vet on Monday.”

“But the fleas will spread—I don’t want to deal with fleas in my room.”