He lay down and turned his back to me. Maybe it’s a trick you learn in the monastery, I thought, how to fall asleep even though your life is on the point of being upended. I leaned against Selma’s bedroom door and waited for my eyes to get used to the dark and for my head to get used to what Frederik had said. I heard Frederik fall asleep. He was wrapped up just like Marlies, but less flowered, and I was happy to sit there the entire night, next to Frederik and the truth of his love that had slipped out. At one point the sleeping optician’s hand fell off the sofa onto Frederik’s bald head and rested there.

When we woke up and went into Selma’s kitchen, it became clear to us that we would never get used to not being greeted there by Selma. The optician said, “I’d like to go into my perimeter.”

“I’d like to go for a walk now,” I said. “And you two?”

I looked at Marlies and Frederik. Frederik was leaning against the kitchen doorframe in his robe. Marlies was standing in front of the kitchen table as if she had been put there by someone for the dubious reason that he didn’t know where else to put her.

Marlies crossed her arms in front of her chest and said, “I don’t want anything at all,” and the optician rolled his eyes. He’d had the faint hope the night before that Marlies would become a new person overnight, because life starts anew when you don’t fire a shot at the last moment after all. He’d thought that you immediately start to appreciate the smaller things, the play of light in the branches of the apple tree, for example. But just as before, Marlies looked like she’d received both an unexpected surcharge and a burst pipe. Marlies had dodged Death but not herself, the optician realized—he had not taken into account earlier that certain changes don’t like to be pushed even if threatened at gunpoint.

“There is no nothing anymore, Marlies,” he said rather pointedly. “It has more or less canceled itself out.”

Marlies glared at the optician and he glared back. Frederik pushed off the doorframe and said, “I’d like to do some cleaning. May I?”

Before, Selma’s kitchen had always been sparkling clean. Once her hands became deformed, she couldn’t manage the same level of cleanliness and wouldn’t let anyone help her. There were spots on the floor and piles of trodden crumbs gathered around the feet of the table legs. Dust bunnies multiplied under the kitchen bench, dark shadows had formed around the handles of the cupboards and the refrigerator, around the knobs on the gas stove, and the glass doors of the credenza were plastered with fingerprints.