Now, in her parlor: where he’s come straight from the BBC on the tube, rapping on her door unexpectedly, surprising her in her painting clothes, asking about the poems he’s just read for the first time, his face shifting and grim. How much more is there; who else has read them; may he see them all?

She’s said nothing in response to his questions. Nothing, like Cordelia. Instead, she left him confounded in the parlor, turning away and mounting the stairs. Her heart thudding, a cannon. Espial of her wretchedly tidy bed through the balusters, the room’s desolate order. Bureau drawers on newspaper in the future au pair’s bedroom lined up for paint in the center of the floor, the first coat drying, a task to keep her busy, to keep her mind occupied, any measure of resistance against the limitless free fall of dispossession. The babies were playing in the nursery; Frieda scolding and piling all the toys up high. Sylvia’s heart a cannon, dangerous and pounding. In Cleverdon’s office? Those were just the beginning, a smattering. He might try to stop her now. In the nursery, Frieda snatched a toy out of Nicholas’s slow, fat arms. “No!” Frieda chided. Undaunted, Nicky picked up something else from the floor, a picture book, and gave a gummy little cough. “No!” said Frieda, grabbing the book away.

He was downstairs, waiting. Quietly drawing the children’s door mostly closed, Sylvia entered her bedroom and approached her desk. This was it. She had nothing else left. Her heart near to bursting in her chest, she gathered it all: every file, everything she’d written since May, teeth sown from the slaughter of a serpent. Every poem she let him read this fall, everything she’s chosen for inclusion in her new collection, everything else, all of it, and she brought it downstairs and handed it to him. Resolute, without a word, masking her hopelessness. He sits now by the windows in her parlor, reading, and he does not speak.

In her eye, the window behind him a rhomboidal block of miniaturized light, a convex transparency of wicker chair and fingers on a page and bookcase behind and kickshaws—Arabic glasses in sapphire blues and purples arranged on the makeshift mantel—reflected all in brown and brown and brown, a hemisphere of dark and glittering brown. Ted sits with the files open in his lap, going over each poem, line by line, each event refracted through her singular intemperate eye.