They were speaking of things they couldn’t possibly know.

Things before them.

Things beyond them.

IX

It snows all through the night. Before I even finish shovelling the driveway there is a fresh flurry settling. I walk into the street and look it up and down. There are low skies and barren trees for as far as the eye can see. Nothing moving in either direction, the snow undisturbed.

I turn back and study the house. It sits set back slightly from the road, the front yard bordered by a series of dwarf hedges. My eyes run along its gabled roof and then down to the broken pediment that sits over the large, panelled front door. I try to assess it objectively, to determine whether I would still be interested as a potential buyer. It is one of the smaller properties on the block, but it is by no means a small property.

We’d bought it the year Simone became pregnant, when the world still felt imbued with magic. It was the first property either of us had ever owned. And it was difficult now, six years on, to imagine having lived anywhere else. There were places before, of course. Various apartments: hers and mine, then mine with her, and finally ours. But those places seem to have crystallised in my mind. Though they still exist it’s hard to imagine us ever having occupied them. Through the haze of memory I seem to have reduced each to a list of unfortunate deficiencies: noisy neighbours, leaky faucets, broken stovetops.

Simone had always hated the congestion of the city. She wanted to raise a family in the kind of place she had grown up. Where neighbours knew each other’s names, and people looked out for one another. But I’d been incredibly reluctant about leaving the city. I had spent my entire life there. It felt like an intrinsic part of me, a piece of my identity. There was a certain sense of anonymity to metropolitan life that I found appealing. Where Simone felt diminished by gathering crowds, I felt a sense of empowerment.

In the end we compromised and bought a family home in a quiet suburb on the outskirts of Chicago. It was the kind of place my parents used to drive past and wished desperately to call their own.

I would joke that I could still see the taillights of the moving van when Simone announced her pregnancy. She would slap my hand when I mentioned the suspicious timing at dinner parties and insist that I was being outrageous, but we both knew there was an element of truth to it.

I’d been unpacking boxes in the master bedroom when she picked up a magazine and began reading it aloud. Moving was the third most stressful life event you could experience, it said, after the death of a loved one and the loss of a job.

She’d lost her mother six months earlier, a sudden illness that had shocked us both in its cruelty, and she’d chosen to leave her work in the city to focus on the move, on our new life in the suburbs.