He had suffered losses through the years, certainly, as anyone his age had. Long ago, Lavinia had walked away from him and into the arms of a man who promised her something better. May Lin had come back into his life briefly at the end, bringing latent joy that was all the sweeter for having been delayed, and she had died in his arms last year.

Maybe that was the start of his decline. Dr. Yang called it a decline. A gradual slide down a hill into a pile of nothingness.

Andrew could not pinpoint the precise moment his memories had begun to slip and his thoughts turned to a jumble. Sometime after the hip debacle, he supposed. Before then, and even during his stay in the hospital and rehab, everything had been clear to him.

Then, once he’d finished with the rehab and returned to Perdita Street, Blythe had moved his living quarters to the main floor. Stairs were out of the question now. The room by the garden used to be a storage area for his father’s apothecary infusions, medicines, and herbs. Later, Andrew had cluttered the space with the tools of his own trade—Stoddard solvent, brushes, tiny pincers and lubricants and cleansers for repairing typewriters.

As he’d settled into his new quarters, which were not unpleasant, the fog had closed in, bit by bit. Fatigue dragged at him, and his stomach was upset by everything he ate. Food tasted like metal. His days started to fade, and his life turned as thin as lukewarm water. He was a ghost in a world that appeared through a glass that was ash-colored and wavy.

At some point he’d lost the proud man who used to swagger around the neighborhood, a regular cock of the walk. These days, he wandered, seeking a way out, and then he asked himself—out of what? He wanted to go home. Then he would remember that he was home.

He was Odysseus one moment, the Ancient Mariner the next, an ordinary man like Tom Joad or a seeker like Douglas Adams’s hitchhiker. He wandered in search of a past that existed only inside himself. He sought fields of flowers and towering cliffs that jutted out over the ocean and mountaintops that pierced the clouds.

Maybe he wandered because he had spent his entire life in one place—the shop on Perdita Street. He used to live upstairs, first with his parents when he was a boy. Then with Lavinia, the wife who had betrayed him. Then with Blythe, whom he had raised with no help from Lavinia. And now he was obliged to bury his daughter with no help from anyone at all.