Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

2

The next morning, Hoegbotton woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment better than he did—knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway—and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once and Hoegbotton agreed with her.

To an extent. There were things Hoegbotton wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A letter had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he smoothed out the letter to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.

The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight—pale and green and lukewarm—suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: gray spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.