The neighborhood was fully dark by the time I parked the car and entered my gate. Henry's kitchen light was on, but I resisted the temptation to pop in to see him. He'd want to feed me dinner, ply me with decent Chardonnay, and catch me up on all the latest gossip. At the age of eighty-two, he's a retired commercial baker, involved now in catering tea parties for little old ladies on our block. As a sideline, he writes those little crossword puzzle booklets you see in supermarket checkout lines, filled with puns, bons mots, and spoonerisms. When he's not doing that, he's usually chiding me about my personal life, which he thinks is not only dangerous, but much too uncivilized.

I let myself into my apartment and flipped on one of the table lamps. I dropped my handbag on the counter that separates my kitchenette from the designated living room. The place had been completely redone after a bomb blast had flattened it. I'd stayed with Henry until the construction was finished, moving back into the apartment on my birthday the previous May. And what a gift it was, like a pirate ship, all teak and brass fittings, a porthole in the door, a spiral staircase leading up to a loft where I could sleep now beneath a skylight salted with stars. My bed was a platform with drawers built into the base. Downstairs, I had a galley for a kitchen, an alcove for a stacking washer/dryer, a living room with a sofa that doubled for company, and a small guest bath. Upstairs, a second bathroom had a sunken tub with a jungle of houseplants on the windowsill and a glimpse of the ocean through the treetops.

The entire apartment was fitted with little nooks and crannies of storage space, cupboards, and hidey-holes, pegs for my clothes. The design was all Henry's, and he'd taken a devilish satisfaction out of shaping my surroundings. The carpet was royal blue, the furnishings simple. Even after six months, I walked around the place as if blind, touching everything, marveling at the feel of it, the scent of the wood. After my parents died, I'd been raised by a maiden aunt, a woman whose relationship with me entailed more theory than affection. Without ever actually saying so, she conveyed the impression that I was there on approval, like a mattress, subject to return if the lumps didn't smooth out. To give her credit, her notions of child raising, if eccentric, were sound, and what she taught me in the way of worldly truths has served me well. Still, for most of my life, I've felt like an intruder and a transient, merely marking time until I was asked to move on. Now my interior world had undergone a shift. This was home and I belonged here. While the apartment was rented, I was a tenant for life. The sensation was strange and I still didn't quite trust it.