Emily took the clothes to my children on her day off, ma’am, Tiny would say. Something like that.

ONE AFTERNOON I needed help hanging a small painting. Not one of mine, it was an oil of a Karoo landscape, rocky outcrops, I don’t even remember the artist. I was moving it from one small alcove to another in the living room, and needed someone to hold it up for me. Later that evening I would ask Josias to bring his toolbox with hammer and nails, but right then I felt compelled to see it, to see how it would be. At which exact spot it should hang, two inches this way, or two inches that. I went out into the yard to call Tiny. I called and called. The washing line was laden with white sheets, towels, our linens, they moved so slightly in the breeze. The dogs were sleeping, they stirred only briefly at my calling. I could hear the radio from Josias’s room. Music, his music, of course.

Tiny emerged at last from her room, from her low door, she was straightening her doek, her head scarf. Yes ma’am? she said. I think, or I felt, then, that there was a man, a friend, in her room. A lover. I don’t know. I felt it. I felt stupid and cruel for bothering her on her afternoon rest. I said, never mind, never mind Tiny, just a small thing, a small thing it is, we can do it later. And we did, we hung the picture later. I return to that memory so often. Perhaps for the first time I thought, or felt, Tiny had her own, intimate, life. She was a young woman after all. How had that not occurred to me before?

JOSEPH HAD BEEN in the garden room for a few weeks. I never saw him, or heard him. Some days I thought we’d imagined him, perhaps he wasn’t really there. I think for the children it was like that: a suggestion of a person, but not a real person. I don’t think they thought of him, at all. Now that strikes me as strange, but I think it’s true.

I had an idea Joseph emerged at night, when we were all asleep, perhaps he walked around the garden. He’d need exercise, he’d need to stretch his legs. I thought how quiet it must be down there under the trees at night; only Joseph. There was an old white bench set back under a willow tree, I imagined it glimmering in the soft dark, and perhaps Joseph had found it and would sit there, listening to the silence, breathing the night air.

I thought about this, worried about it, as I walked, myself, through my day. Up and down the garden; to the pool; to my car. I didn’t walk much.

But Joseph. He was like a prisoner. He was a prisoner.

I had no idea about his wife and children, but he’d mentioned them. He’d told Howard and me, that first evening, that his mother-in-law had moved into his house, she would help. I tried to imagine them: people like us, but alone now at home, without him. How they managed for money, I don’t know. Perhaps the resistance, the organization, paid for his family, that might be so. Perhaps his family was living on saved money, he’d been a lawyer, after all. Again, I don’t know.