“Instead you built a replica,” I said through the misleading whimsy of a sigh.

As though on cue, the front door opened and a figure stepped out onto the dark porch, a shadow cast across her face by the columns upholding the second-story balcony. She wore a dark dressing gown, and though she did not speak, she quieted us both. After only two uncertain steps, someone reached out from the entryway to guide Dolores back in, and my heart hiccupped, beginning again.

“The house was designed in what’s called Queen Anne style,” Lyman said, after clearing his throat, his hands by his sides now. “It was rather popular when I was a boy. I suppose I never fully recovered from it because I felt I had to have a second one here.”

I took several steps toward the house, Lyman’s voice trailing off behind me. He made no move to follow as I went up the steps and crossed between the columns. Reaching for the front door, I looked over my shoulder to see him still beside the car, his mouth hanging slightly open.

Inside, the foyer was dim. A staircase stood on my left, its polished arm sweeping up to the first of several landings, its steps decorated by a wide runner of plush carpet. An opening gaped to my right and, beyond it, the furniture brooded within great pools of shadow. Hissing whispers rushed upon me in swells and I hesitated, hoping to determine into which room Dolores and her attendant had disappeared.

I recognized the voice in the whispers; it was my own.

In the darkness ahead, French doors stood apart, their distance just enough to remind me of quarreling lovers captured in flickering black and white—too far to embrace but close enough to touch. Like Harvey standing in front of me in a dormitory, forever slipping away into the hall. If I hesitated long enough, the doors, whose curtained glass kept everything but the voices within a secret, might have reconciled and shut themselves tight. I hurried through and found the two women together, the attendant perched on the edge of the white silk sofa and Dolores partially reclined as though she’d flung herself there. Her head leaned against one of the extravagant rises of the wingback, and her legs were outstretched at an angle across it so that her attendant had little room on the three-seater. At my entrance, Dolores snapped her fingers twice before kissing at the air like I was the kitten she’d been beckoning.

It was the sight of the attendant that made my heart sink. She was old enough—at least as far as I could tell—but I immediately knew she could not have been our mother. I’d been certain she would not be here, yet something in me, I realized, had been hoping otherwise.