My suggestion to show her around caught her by surprise, I could tell. Her eyebrows lifted. “Okay,” she said fast, as if she sensed my inner doubt and didn’t want to give me an opportunity to take it back.

I took a deep breath. “Come on,” I said, and we walked out of the house and toward the city’s hidden entrance.

As I walked, my legs felt like lead. She would not understand, and I did not want to explain it to her.

But when we reached the edge of the city I had built, and I opened the secret door that led inside, she only looked around and said, “Whoa.” Her mouth hung open. An expression crossed her face that I hadn’t seen in ages, one of pure wonder, of delight.

After we stood still for several awed seconds, I guided her to the front of my apartment building and up the stairs to Apartment 201. “This is where I live,” I said, “usually.” Catching sight of the birdcage on the balcony as I crested the stairs, I positioned myself between it and her so as to shield it from her view. I unlocked the door, motioning for her to step inside first. I stepped in after her, breathing in the air I’d been missing.

For a moment I was nervous, my stomach fluttering over the next sentence, but then my heart clenched when I saw that many of my plants were suffering, and a few of them had died back. Without thinking, I dodged around Rita and rushed into the kitchen. I got a large water glass and began watering them, starting with the small ones in the kitchen. After a minute or two, Rita poked her head into the kitchen and, when she saw what I was up to, got herself a glass, too, and started on the plants on the other side of the living room. Quietly we tended to them, pulling out the yellowed leaves beyond saving. The plant that sat near the telephone in the living room, a large schefflera, was bone dry, and Rita carried it into the kitchen to sit in the sink. She held it while I took the sprayer to it, and each of us took a moistened paper towel and gently wiped down its leaves. When we were finished, I put it back out on the side table and stepped back to admire it, and I looked up at Rita and nodded, saying, “Looks good,” and she smiled back.

I resisted the urge to take her hand. Tending to this plant was, perhaps, the most intimate thing I had ever done with someone.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to explain to Rita. There were a great many things that passed between us that needed no explanation.

At first, she slept on the couch, but as the days and weeks wore on, and as time did its thing of abstracting itself, stretching into infinity between the passing hours, she took the girls’ bedroom and slept in Janet’s bed.