IN THE narrow beam of a flashlight, in the haven of Leora’s childhood bedroom with its white-painted desk and chair, the half-drowned dolls lay on the dollhouse’s second story like gasping refugees washed up after a shipwreck as Jake rubs at the puddles of floodwater on the dollhouse’s soggy floorboards, hopelessly, with one of the destroyed dollhouse rugs. The salvaged furniture from the bottom floor is so waterlogged that all of Jake’s freshly glued repairs have come undone. The paints, the Spinoza library, and the video collection have been utterly lost. All that remains is the bedroom on the top floor, where the easel stands on dry land. Jake gives the doll wearing the crown another drying wipe with the corner of his own soaked shirt and then gives up, propping her up soaked beside the portrait’s frame.

He switches on the light behind the slide painting to give it one last test, thanking God under his breath that he chose a battery-powered light. The painting ignites, and the woman reading her letter bursts into a flash of color that bounces onto the diamond in the crown around the doll’s head. Suddenly Jake hears a giant rushing sound coming from downstairs, winds and thunder and great waves of howling rain pouring into the house. Then, just as suddenly, the sounds stop, sucked into silence by a slammed door.

Jake switches off his flashlight and the light from the slide and stands next to the destroyed dollhouse, the unredeemable dollhouse, in the dark, trembling as he hears Leora’s voice downstairs, as it laughs and flutters between her parents below, like wind on water. A few moments later, his heart begins to pound along with her feet, as he hears her bounding up the staircase. The door to the room opens.

Leora enters, a flashlight in her hands. The beam moves across the floor, gliding across the room to the bed, stopping just short of Jake’s feet. She hasn’t noticed him. But she sees, he can tell by the hesitant sliding of the flashlight beam, that something is different in the room. He holds his breath.

Leora’s flashlight beam travels along the bottom of the bed, jumps up across the windows, then hovers, slowly, very slowly, toward the desk. The circle of light creeps up, up, up above the drawers of the desk, and suddenly the light strikes it: the dollhouse.

She gasps, then is silent, then gasps again. He hears her starting to sob in the darkness as the beam of light tours the rooms one by one, as if counting them, casting long shadows over the ruins. Suddenly Jake cannot wait anymore.

“Leora,” he says, finding her free hand in the dark.

She screams in surprise, then slides the flashlight over to him, finding his hand, his elbow, his ear, his face, and yelps again, and laughs, and kisses him, and laughs again.

“Jake! What are you doing here?”