Arriving home at my own house, I called Geannie’s old number. I had deleted it, but the muscle memory of dialing it hadn’t left me. My fingers passing over the old numbers felt faintly occult, as if a ghost was two rooms over and I could detect just the edges of it. But the number was disconnected.

I set my phone down and looked at my hands, which were shaking. Why were they shaking? For days after, whenever I thought about Krystal in the house, my hands shook. Until then I had avoided looking at Geannie and Jim’s house on my way to work, had even taken an alternate, longer route to work for a time, but since I saw her car there it was all I could think about. And I was curious, too. What could she be doing in there? Who gave her the right? She’d always disliked it. Called it names, insulted its style, the overwhelming potpourri her mother used, the fact that Jim was so particular about how things were arranged. Krystal had no appreciation for that house. I imagined her in there trashing it, taking out her petty furies on it, and my insides turned to acid. These thoughts disturbed the delicate mental biosphere I had cultivated by that time, clouding up my head where total blankness, the state of being I strove for in those days, could have been.

The next time I saw Krystal after that, we were sitting at the small kitchen table in her apartment on a Friday night. Her place was small and kind of dingy, and everything had the ground-in smell of cooking grease and ancient cigarette smoke from past tenants, but her kitchen was cozy—yellow checked curtains at the window and blue and green plates in the cupboard. Since the robbery we’d fallen into a habit of eating dinner together on Fridays at her place, after which we’d wash the dishes or watch television together in silence. Or sometimes, in warm weather, we took a walk around her neighborhood before it got dark. Both of us seemed to have lost the interest or the ability to befriend other people.

She had made us TV dinners that now steamed up at us. “Saw your car at Geannie’s the other night,” I said, watching her.

She started spooning the grainy Salisbury steak gravy into her mouth with extra enthusiasm, not looking at me. “Oh, that,” she said. At first I thought she was just going to leave it there.

Then she said, “I go over there sometimes. I go over to pack it up. That’s what they would want, you know.”

I nodded and took a drink. We both sat there and chewed in silence.

“I go over to pack it up,” she said again, “but I always end up staying. You know?”

I knew. I let it drop and changed the subject. We finished the evening as usual, and I left without bringing it up again.

But I worked the night shift for another four months after that, and I started mentally tracking the days I saw her car at the house. Once it was there for a week straight. Once it was only two nights. Then a whole month.