It’s taken this long for me to revisit the scene of Nick’s death, but now that I’ve lied to the police when I had nothing to hide, my interest is piqued. Once home, I head upstairs to the skinny door between the upstairs bathroom and Jonah’s bedroom, and I slide the key from its hiding place on the trim atop the doorframe, but a key wasn’t necessary. The police must have left it unlocked.

I tug a chain hanging just inside the musty spiral staircase leading up, but the lightbulb is dead, so I climb the stairs and nearly head-butt the trapdoor, which lifts with ease, and I step up into the cupola, an antique bubble, taking note of the cloudy window panes and overgrowth obscuring an otherwise splendid panorama of my property, neighborhood, town.

So this is where Nick stood before he threw himself to his death. Did he take in the view, too? Did he even appreciate it?

On weathered benches framing the interior of this room, varnish peels in shiny strips. I could have painted it white, fixed the wiring, added pillows, a coffee table, stacks of magazines. That sort of thing might work for people who live in the past, but not for me. Frank McAlister has me all wrong. I’m no champion of bygone days. Overhead hangs the sole decoration: dulled prisms on a dated chandelier that can’t catch light.

I wiggle the loose knob on a swollen, splintered door opening to the roof walk. Until a couple of weeks ago, this place hardly ever crossed my mind. Twice a year, tops: first freeze, first thaw. I clean up leaves and check for leaks and contemplate tearing the whole thing down. Then I lock the door again and forget this place exists.

From a distance, our sculpted banisters suggest the Italian belvederes after which they were modeled, but up here, the effect is more Dr. Zhivago’s winter palace crusted with seagull feces instead of icicles, salt crystals instead of frost. There’s no warmth here. No reason to hang out, except to dive off.

A widow’s walk: even the name portends doom. Some dumb romantic probably made it up, swooning at the thought of sailors’ wives standing on platforms like these, waiting for long-lost mariner husbands, dead husbands. I suppose “chimney cleaner’s walk” didn’t summon the same architectural esteem (or need for prickly building codes). So maybe the romantic wasn’t dumb, after all. Maybe he was a marketing genius.