In the living room, I drew the curtains back and the sun poured in, making me squint. The Chrysler Building looked like a shadow of itself in the daylight; it was waiting for evening, when it could give everyone the finger. I walked past my parents’ room, then changed my mind and entered. Inside my mother’s walk-in closet, on top of the dresser, was a row of her perfumes. I made my way through the bottles, methodically removing each cap and drawing the dispenser to my nose. The scents weren’t wildly different, each a variation on a theme that I found repellent, something like forest floor mixed with animal urine. I knew she loved this type of “woodsy” scent—the closest she felt comfortable getting to the outdoors. There was something irritating to me about not just the category of the smell, but the variations she had lined up, bottle by bottle—it seemed like a failure of character to me that she couldn’t commit to one signature scent after all this time or, in opposition, that she hadn’t collected wildly different scents as a form of play. I felt resentful, and also I felt sad.

Once I was finished, I made for my father’s closet. The door was closed, and I paused, my palm pressed against it. Did I want to go inside? It had been a little more than a week, now, since my night here with Langham—the hairy round belly, my father’s shoes. I didn’t know that I was ready to revisit the space. Would doing so conjure such painful self-recrimination that I would lose my nerve to speak to them, just take myself home? And yet: Could I resist?