The house was somewhere between a castle and a hive, entirely made of poured concrete with hardly a straight edge anywhere. Rooms with curved walls and vaulted ceilings led haphazardly to other rooms by way of a few steps down, a few more up, the walls embedded with tiles and pottery collected from all over the world. His room, which was shaped like a teepee, was on what would have been the third floor, had the rooms separated neatly into levels: high in the air, facing the tile works. At his desk, a concrete slab that flowed directly out of the wall, he was meant to be calculating what new equipment Mr. Hazelius might need, how to install it, how best to train the workmen to use it. Instead he found himself eavesdropping on the complicated life of the house. Maids, a cook, a driver, an elderly man who announced himself as an archivist. Mr. Hazelius’s son, Edward, who was near his own age and was apparently being groomed to take over the tile works. With his young wife and their little boy, Edward sat for hours on the patio below Didier’s window, sometimes with his father but more often—Mr. Hazelius traveled a great deal—with his friend and neighbor, a man named Miles Fairchild. Both had gone to Penn but Edward hadn’t finished his degree. He was dreamy, Didier learned. Prone to odd enthusiasms, utterly bored by the tile works. His passion was the excavation of fossil bones, and he’d traveled with Miles in Kansas and Nebraska, digging up the bones of creatures Didier had never heard of. He realized, listening to their conversations during his first weeks, that they were preparing for a trip.

Certain scenes from that summer remained in Didier’s memory as clearly as the drawings he made in the factory. What he couldn’t recover were the feelings or how he’d rationalized what he’d done. He’d been twenty-one. Edward’s wife was equally young. He had no idea what had gone wrong between Chloe and Edward, but he could see how useless Edward was at the tile works. A few days after Edward left with his friend, the little boy, Lawrence, developed mumps, and he and Chloe both disappeared for nearly two weeks. Another week passed before Didier spotted the boy playing in his usual place in the walled garden. Not long after that, he began running into Chloe everywhere.

Or that was how he remembered it now—had she really started appearing on the path between the row of tulip trees just as he walked back from the plant, on the patio before he went in to breakfast? Or had he simply become more aware of her?