“It’s perfect,” I said, pulling at drawers, scanning my bookshelf, opening the wardrobe. Everything was where it should be. Some of it was mine and some was brand-new but I also knew it, knew where everything was supposed to be, like I’d done it myself. I remember wondering if Novo could see inside me, see my imagination like a film screen, and I didn’t want to know the answer. I didn’t even want to ask.

“Am I scaring you?” he said.

It was ridiculous and unthinkable. It should have scared me. But what can I say? It just didn’t.

“I mean. This is nothing,” he said. “A bit of DIY. If this was too much already then we’d have a problem.”

I smiled at him. “You’re not scaring me.”

“Good,” he said, looking up through the skylight. “That’s good.”

“Want to see the roof?” I said, standing on the bed and pulling myself up and through it. Novo came up after me and we stood together outside under that dome of blue. Down below us, across the street, the noise had finished now and all the contents of Mrs. Midler’s house were in the front yard, arranged room by room, as if the building had just picked itself up and moved over a bit when our backs were turned. There were people out there, milling about, picking over everything. Two women in bright anoraks were having a serious think about some hunting-scene place mats. Some kids played building blocks with a load of shell-thin china cups until somebody noticed and told them to stop. A man was trying to persuade his wife to take home an enormous oil painting of a dog. The woman opposite-but-one was looking at lamps, tugging at their wiring, lifting them up to see underneath. Other strangers flicked mercilessly through Mrs. Midler’s books, pulled at her clothes with the tips of their fingers, passed judgment on her taste in art and crammed their feet into her favorite shoes. A girl at a table full of jewelry weighed a pair of heavy costume earrings in her hand.

I thought about Mrs. Midler’s life, whoever she was. Unique, same as everyone else’s, with its own bar charts of disappointment and reward, its own strict and arbitrary rules. And still somehow it ended up in boxes marked HELP YOURSELF.

“It’s her life story,” Novo said, and I said, “Yes. I was thinking that. Let’s go down there. I’d like to see.”

So we did, and I found myself standing at a table packed sky-high with matching china. An obstacle course of etiquette broken up into affordable lots, so the soup bowls would never again see the saucers, the breakfast cups the milk jug. Nobody likes being dismantled. Nothing wants to get taken apart. I felt sorry for them, even if they were only plates.