I left her watching the birds while I boiled water and found hibiscus tea for the pretty glass teapot she’d brought as a gift. Her hair had changed since the treatments, but a clever stylist had shaped the coarse strands into chic feathery points. Long creases in front of her ears, deep folds in the skin of her neck, hands as veiny and spotted and dry as my own, with the cracked yellowish nails that came from years of working with chemicals in the lab. When we were young, she would have scheduled a manicure before the Silver Lake Gathering.

Two weeks every summer; a hundred or so structural biochemists; each time a different topic but always amazing talks, wild arguments, unexpected collaborations springing up among researchers sprawled on the large flat rock beside the lake or playing badminton poorly. We’d been invited first as postdocs, when the chance to go there meant everything; we primped before that first nervous arrival, and even after several summers we still painted our toenails and bought new shorts. I’d bought this cabin, which was four miles from the main gate of Silver Lake, after one of our visits. An easy drive even at night: and then, I’d crowed to Deirdre, no more sleeping in the infamous dormitories or sharing squalid bathrooms. I’d sleep in the loft and she could sleep on the couch near the woodstove whenever she wanted. We’d use it every summer.

Instead I’d dropped out of science and for years had hardly visited what was once my favorite part of the world. Sometimes I’d been able to rent the cabin out for the summer, which paid the taxes. Other years it sat empty save for the odd week or two, colonized by the mice who, when I returned, were reluctant to leave. Deirdre, who’d followed me into the kitchen, found one of them as she rummaged around for some sugar.

“The fuck?” she said, jumping back from the open cabinet.

Gently, apologizing, I nudged her aside and closed the door.

The creature, who had drowned in an inch of olive oil at the bottom of an old bottle lacking its cap, now floated belly-up, preserved like mouse confit. Pink paws, closed eyes. (Deirdre must have seen the paws.) I’d found it last fall, when I moved in full-time, and sometimes I imagined it talking to me. It, the other mice in the crawl space, the turkeys pterodactyling through the woods. The coyotes, who sang around the cabin at night. Sometimes it was so quiet that my own breath startled me.

To Deirdre, as if we were both city people and this was a rural joke, I said, “Isn’t that odd? I found it before Christmas and it was so astonishing I hung on to it.”