Pars Mansoor was the last off the minibus. He stepped onto the gravel drive and inhaled the low tide and the privet. The wind had turned warm, somewhat tropical, with spits of rain now and again. He climbed to the portico and nodded at Kevin, who smiled back, and he entered the open double doors into the lobby. The hallway was infused with the odor of pork roast. He passed into the drawing room. He really hadn’t paid any attention to the house the night before. It had been dark and he’d spent the day traveling and he’d been interested only in collapsing into a bed—any bed. But now he noticed the green leather couches, the frosted glass globes and brass fixtures, the mahogany table on claw-foot legs. In the dining room, a woman with a frizz of orange hair was setting tables. She blushed when he said hello and returned fixedly to her silverware. He passed through the room and into another off the rear of the house with a billiard table and wooden beads strung on a wire above the baize. A leaded-glass window looked out onto a perennial bed where coneflowers nodded in the breeze. On the green baize sat two balls, one black, one yellow. The eight and the nine. He rolled the yellow gently as he passed.

The night before, when he arrived, Pars had noticed an oddly familiar odor in the house he couldn’t quite place. And now, as he wandered through a swing door into the next room, he smelled it again. What was it? Old books! He recognized the odor now: the smell of damp pages beside the sea, that peculiar moldy paper smell. He entered the library—who even knew it was there?—and the odor was exactly the same as that of the library in Remsfjord in Norway, where he’d spent so many hours after he first escaped Iran.

Pars dropped into a red overstuffed chair in the corner. His knees felt slightly weak. He hadn’t thought of that town or that library in years. But that particular odor, locked away all this time, brought him back now completely to those long afternoons in the library above the North Sea. And Pars Mansoor had the strangest sensation of having been in that room before. Not necessarily that exact room or that exact chair, but in the same place, the same state of mind, sixteen years earlier; and for a moment it seemed to Pars that time itself stood still and nothing had changed and he was still that young confused man who’d arrived alone, exiled, friendless, to the small town in Norway.