It wasn’t until I started to climb the stairs that led from the main entrance to the bedrooms above that I realized I didn’t know where William’s nursery was. Crying was coming from the room at the top of the stairs and I found the door partly open. I gave it a gentle push and it swept back to reveal Lonnie, naked, tangled in the pin-striped sheets of a four-poster bed. She lay on her side, her back to me, her dark locks spread around the pillow, the thin line of her neck emerging through the hair. A square of sunlight illuminated the concavity of her waist, the little white hairs on her skin, and the dust swirling in the air above her. She drew one leg slowly up and the sheet came with it, sliding up her inner thigh. On her nightstand was the source of the crying—another baby monitor, through which she was apparently having no trouble sleeping.

I stepped backward—not breathing, leaving the door agape—and ran up another flight of stairs where I could now hear, in the room at the front of the house, William’s fussing starting to turn to wails. He calmed when I lifted him out of his crib and stared at me for a moment before, having judged me kindly, he rested his head in the crook of my neck. I hummed to him and looked around his room.

It was not cluttered with toys or decor, though a wooden train set was spread out across the greater part of a wool shag rug. A mobile of downy sheep hung above the crib and next to it a painting of an endearing frowning lion. Above the changing table I recognized an Edward Gorey illustration, a tiny, serenely smiling bow-tied boy at a long white-clothed table with a tiny fruit plate and tiny dinner bell. Behind him, the back of an enormous Gothic chair and then crosshatched shadows.

As there was still no sign of Lonnie, I walked William over to the changing table and unbuttoned his onesie. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and stared at me as I worked. He was long, skinny, and light to lift, like he was made of hollow bird bones. Something about his expression, whether serious or smiling, was a little vacant and dreamy. After I buttoned him back up, he squirmed to be put down and toddled on tiptoe back to his crib, yanking a matted grayish-white blanket lined in satin through the slats. He gripped a corner to his nose, and then made his way back to me, holding the same corner up, offering me a turn. I bent down and gave the blanket a good sniff. The fabric smelled like baby powder and, more faintly, urine. Without taking his fingers out of his mouth, he laughed.