It was a time that she remembered vividly, the memory amplified by the stillness of her home, still immersed in a silence that had remained unbroken since she’d walked out a few hours earlier. Solitude was an unobtrusive housemate; it took up no room and never touched anything. It had no smell or color. It was an absence, an entity defined in contrast to its opposite. Yet it existed; it was the force that made Teresa’s cup of chamomile tea shake on its saucer on those nights when sleep refused to come to her rescue. That tinkling would spread through the house without ever encountering the warmth of another living creature. Solitude wrapped itself around Teresa like a dress a size too small, like an old-fashioned corset that makes you stand up straighter when others can see you, but leaves you gasping for breath when you’re on your own.

She had learned to treat loneliness by applying the same principle that makes an antidote work on poison: she absorbed a small dose of it every day. She didn’t try to elude it, nor did she seek distractions; she stood her ground and let it bite.

The house greeted her with the black and white smiles in the magnified photographs on the walls: cheerful, sometimes brazen, often imbued with a hint of melancholy that added to their effect. These were the friends who kept her company every evening when she picked up a book and settled into her sofa: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Jeff Buckley . . . Her hibernating soul would come awake with a jolt of pleasure at the sound of their voices. She had bought the prints at a flea market, back when she could still bring herself to get in the car on a weekend and drive for miles looking for things to add to her nest. But that nest had never quite lived up to its name, and she’d spent most of her life there alone. It had taken her a long time to shrug off the sadness.

But she had kept moving, one step at a time, and in spite of everything, she was still standing. She hadn’t lost her way, and she had forgiven herself. Life could be terrifying when you really looked at it and discovered what it could morph into, but it was still sacred, inviolable, a momentous journey to be faced with a racing heart and a sense of wonder.

She had to believe that, or else she would have lost her mind long ago.

“We’re never truly alone,” she murmured into the silence.

She wasn’t sure whether she really believed that, or if it was merely a pretense designed to keep her going.