It was his no longer. The disarray was approximately the same, but everywhere there were signs the basement had been occupied for much longer than tonight, maybe even since he’d first been locked out of it, that the three people he’d seen in the foyer had been all over here, sleeping in the bed, eating from the refrigerator, fucking on the couch. With every new piece of evidence he found—a backpack stuffed with clothes and toiletries, a bag of oregano, a quarter-loaf of wheat bread in the fridge, a wet toothbrush at the bathroom sink, a tube of eyeliner, the crumpled sheets on the bed—David felt a little piece of his composure slipping away, a pit of fear growing in his stomach, a tremendous uncertainty. There was no protection in this house, not really, in this neighborhood of houses, their walls were nothing but wood and brick and plaster. They belonged to no one: even David himself, his body—he remembered pulling out of Sarah, unable to control himself, bursting into the room—it wasn’t his. He thought of the jar of emergency money in the pantry—was it still there? Should he hide it somewhere? Bury it? A heaviness fell over him, and he went to his knees, he pressed his forehead into the vinyl skin of the couch, took in the petrified odors of dried sweat and fast food and weed, and let himself cry, folded over. He had nowhere to go.