“No,” she says, like the coldness of space. “It isn’t.”

“Our child should grow up in the best environment we can provide him. Do you really think this is it?” Elizabeth makes a noncommittal noise I can’t decipher from my limited perspective. “He’s my son too, you know.”

“I thought you didn’t want him.”

His sigh is heavy, weighted with regret. “Of course I want him. He’s my goddamned son, for Christ’s sake. I just want to do things the right way. And I love you, but you don’t always know what’s best.”

Don’s words echo in my mind, and I think of the other times he has wanted things done the right way: when I organized their books wrong and he knocked them to the floor; when someone at work had an error in their code and he berated them over the phone; when Don himself discovered he had overcooked our chicken breasts for dinner, stabbed his fork into the tough white meat, and pushed the plate away, disgusted. Threw it away, uneaten. What will happen, I wonder, when he decides they are not raising their son in completely the right way?

The next pause is so long that I wonder if they’ve fallen asleep, or engaged in a staring contest, or if time has frozen and I will find they have become statues. I peek around the corner, through the sliver of the open door, and I see a slice of the scene, the two of them sitting there.

“What are you doing?”

I jump and turn around.

My mother is standing behind me with her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised. She looks from me to the door, then finally pushes it open and barges into the room; when we enter, both Don and Liz are staring in our direction, their marble eyes shiny and expectant.

Now with an audience, Elizabeth sits up straighter and looks back at Don. “All right,” she says. “But I’m not coming home. I’m all settled in. You can stay here if you like.” She glances at my mother for confirmation, and Agnes nods.

“Okay,” says Donovan uncertainly, looking around the room at the ornate mantelpiece, the burnt-out fireplace, the moth-eaten sofa, the age-worn curtains, the stained carpet, the anachronistic bronze floor lamps with dusty shades, the antiquity and gloom. He stands and kisses Elizabeth on the forehead.

She allows this and says, “You won’t stay in my room, though.”

“What? You’re giving me the couch?”

“Oh, no need for that. We have plenty of spare rooms,” my mother chimes in.

And that’s how Donovan Hill came to stay with us.

I have been tasked with changing the bedsheets in the Rose Room, where Don will be staying for the foreseeable future. The other spare bedrooms have sunk so far into disarray that it would take weeks to make them livable again, and while their doors have not been locked, they have been shut up for quite some time—long enough that these rooms have been colonized by spiders and dust mites and who knows what else besides.