The master bedroom is slightly larger than the other two and has a connecting bath. This room has been made habitable. The bed is made. Rose’s old duvet and shams, with the Tree of Life motif, look out of place in the square dun-colored room. They should have repainted before the furniture arrived. Uncharacteristically, Harley rushed the move.

Harley Dennis was a most considerate individual, yet he had rushed the move. Rose stops and thinks about that. He wanted to be moved in before school started. He wanted to be in Charlotte so when Flynn was working trade shows out of town, he and Rose could take Mel. Rose wonders if Harley had a premonition of his impending death. She believes in premonitions and at the same time suspects people purporting to have them of being deluded or dishonest.

Upstairs, as was the case downstairs, the blinds are lowered, and the nearly new dun-colored drapes, left behind by the previous owners, are closed. The resulting claustrophobic twilight adds to Rose’s sense of dream-walking through a mausoleum. She has her hand on a drape before she realizes that, for now, this is her world. No light, no movement that might alert neighbors or police to the fact that there is a life-form dwelling within, can be allowed to escape.

Rose loves light. A darkened house is purgatory. Purgatory or Longwood, Rose tells herself, pick one.

She sits on the edge of the bed. She is free. She can walk, talk, see, smell, and feel. She has Melanie. This is a good moment. For a while she waits for that revelation to travel from her mind to her heart. It makes it about halfway, catching in her throat.

“Cheer yourself up,” she says into the dusty gloom.

Leaving the borrowed jeans, T-shirt, and underpants in a trail on the bedroom floor, Rose goes into the bathroom. Turning both showerheads on, she wastes a criminal amount of water scrubbing the nursing home out of her hair and the pores of her skin.

When she runs out of hot water, she wraps herself in a towel. There is a toothbrush in a stand by the sink. Rose hopes it’s hers. Picking it up, she looks for a drawer that might contain toothpaste.

Time stutters to a halt. On the counter, in a small egg-shaped bowl of blue Wedgwood, is a gold heart-shaped locket. It is the first gift Harley ever gave her. Rose lifts it and fastens it around her neck. Beneath are two rings of gold, inset with small flat rectangular diamonds: her wedding and engagement bands.

With a sense of returning irreplaceable artifacts to their proper places, Rose puts them on. Holding her left hand to her chest, she looks in the mirror at the gold locket and the wedding rings. Harley is in the next room. For the rest of her life, her husband will be in the next room. “Thank you, love,” she calls lightly.