The mystery began to eat at me. For several years now, each of these walls had been decorated with wall hangings that fit with the rest of the décor, and the long-gone caseworkers had furnished these mysterious areas according to my own imagination and suggestions. Furniture that was occasionally glimpsed on-screen sat in these areas. I’d reasoned that these items had to have lived against the fourth wall when they were out of sight of the camera, but I could never know for sure.

That was the thing. There were so many uncertain elements of this world I had dared to improvise or change according to my selfish whim—Furley’s TV was proof of that—and the guilt and uncertainty suffocated me and filled me with total desolation. How could we ever know another person’s life? All the tiny details that are never relayed to us, that are kept hidden. Sloppy guesswork is as close as one can come to the truth. So who was I to say what was on these fourth walls?

The whole enterprise started feeling like a sham. A fraud. If one thing was wrong, it was all wrong. Punishment for trying to build it at all, for my own hubris, seemed nigh.

Sometimes, if I stared long enough, I could see things in the wall. Its stucco and wallpaper would rearrange itself into the shapes of childhood memories, shadows of my father. His coat that hung on the basement door in the home I grew up in, clotted with dust, until the day I sold the house.

Sometimes my mother would make an appearance, me reading to her in the hospital.

Sometimes Geannie and Jim. Sometimes Hernan. Chilly autumnal evenings would come back to me, the smell of rot and earth. I dozed and slept for most of the days, always between consciousness, watching as reality became a wavy afterimage of itself.

By then I rarely thought about Krystal’s demise. Time was a river that carried me away from events in the recent past that I had not yet assimilated as reality, and in its waters these memories could easily drown, sucked under by the current of repeating days, seasons, weeks, routines. I’ve often wondered if it’s the same in a convent, or a prison.

Midway through a March day of sulking on the couch while contemplating the wall, the phone rang. Its noise made me jerk so hard I bit my lip, but I walked over and picked up the receiver casually, as if I had been answering the phone every day for the past six years.

It was Larwin. “I’ve had a heart attack,” he said. His voice sounded weak, the bluster gone. I believed him. He took it as a sign to retire, he said, and since I was one of his only clients, he wanted to let me know. “My younger partner Morris is taking over. I’m sending him out to meet you.”

“Meet me?” I panicked. “What? No.”

“Yes, he’ll have to meet you,” Larwin’s breath was so short and shallow he was nearly panting. I wondered if he was calling me from his hospital bed. I tried to hear the beeps of heart monitors, or other indications of his location, but I couldn’t make anything out. “Don’t you want to know if you can trust him? You can’t do that over the phone.”