“The eighty-year-old three-bedroom house had just come on the market. Experts estimate that the house, given its architectural heritage, would have drawn bids above its $545,000 asking price, more than double its value just two years ago. There is no comment at this time from the family’s realtor.” Shot of fire-damaged open house sign.

“That’s repellent,” said Mary-Sue. “This is a culture with more sympathy for the real estate than for that poor dead woman. Or her orphan girls. You’ve got to wonder about terrorism. It is Christmas. We are Santa Claus Lane.”

“Mom, please stop,” said Kate. “Not everything is terrorism.”

“You said yourself the boy looked Arabic.”

“I said he was a dark-haired, Mediterranean type. I was careful not to say words like Arabic because I know how hysterical people can get.”

As she said this, she felt a knocking from deep within her body. Someone was kicking the walls of her womb, trying to get her attention. Up to now, the baby had been very good about not moving around unnecessarily. This sensation was new. She pictured her fetus rappelling up the interior of her ribcage, stepping over the spongy honeycombs that were her lungs, getting a toehold on her breastplate so it could advance toward the gauzy ray of light that had appeared above like a chimera, just out of finger reach. Oh wait, wrong end.

“You too, stop.” She patted her belly. “I know you’re there. I know you’re there.”

Raymond surveyed his flourishing camellia bushes. Each bloom resembled a snowman’s meaty white fist—if snowmen had fists. He chose the three best and snipped them off. It was astounding how their presence softened the angularity of that mahogany dining table. He’d never fully grasped how severe and grim his things were until the girls arrived. The first week, neither of them had dared place their elbows on the table. Then he realized—his furniture scared them.

As Rosemary and Mira grew more comfortable, they flopped around the living room like the girls in a Balthus painting—hems up, guard down, as they perused his novels, getting to know him tale-by-tale. He liked how relaxed the couch looked with its cushions dented by their bodies, the poised dimples in the chenille pillows lost to rumpled disarray. The paint chipping off the upstairs bathroom door, caused by the girls’ thoughtless kicks and bumps, might have been described by Pottery Barn as an “artisanal shabby chic.” And it was this type of aesthetic reasoning that helped him justify to himself why he was harboring the girls, why he felt so kindly toward them.