By the way my mother clenches her jaw I’m to know this is a great sacrifice. She must have canceled class—something she never does—and I imagine thirty or so students gleefully throwing papers into the air before speeding out to do handsprings on the brown quad or stumble back to their dorms to sleep. You’re welcome, I think.

The books she brought me disappear into her canvas bag, and I see her lips pucker at the thumbed-down page of the first book not even halfway through.

The air outside is thin and cool, but the short walk to the car leaves me winded, and I collapse into the passenger seat of her station wagon, amazed by the strange weakness of my legs.

“You’re staying with us,” my mother says, as I struggle with the safety belt.

When I don’t respond, she adds, “Your father’s put new sheets on your bed,” as if this settles anything.

I’m torn between irritation and relief. I don’t like the idea of the two of them making decisions on my behalf, taking control of my whereabouts as if I’m a child, but the thought of a hotel—another nondescript space, shuffling by strangers in the morning, listening to moaning and weeping through the walls—seems too similar to the situation I just left.

I think of my parents’ warm sunroom. The smell of rich coffee and floor-to-ceiling books on the shelves. The constant hum of my father’s record player, NPR in the kitchen as he cooks, or his own voice as he reads the news out loud. On paper, it’s cozy and comforting. But there’s a reason I rarely visit. And it’s more than memories of my father checking on me every ten minutes, his footsteps pounding up the stairs if I so much as dropped a hairbrush, the locks double- and triple-checked. It’s the unsettled feeling I always have in that house. The whispers of my parents that stop whenever I enter a room. The certainty that something’s been misplaced. As a child, never being able to sit still and always looking for movement just out of the corner of my eye. The unease has settled over time, but every now and then I still expect something or someone to walk out of the shadows.

I’m allowed to return to my own home first to gather some things but have been given strict instructions not to linger.

An unusual number of cars line my street. Colorful wreaths grace doorways, and smoke puffs from chimneys in houses where residents should be at work. I frown and watch a large, balding man I’ve never seen before drag a large pot from his back seat. The late-morning lull makes me edgy. It feels like the world’s holding its breath, but for what?