The hallway crowds in, monumentally silent. Sylvia listens, knowing Ted is also listening, to the amplified beat of their feet on the stairs, the arrhythmic slap of her hand gripping the heavy Victorian banister. Her heart, stilled in her chest. This is the moment, in all her certainty about this move to London, that she couldn’t imagine: how Ted becomes any random knock at the door—a nappy deliveryman, a meter reader, a temporary agency nanny. A man who takes her children to the zoo while she paints the parlor. He’s come to her door; he has no key. He’ll never have a key. Cell by cell, her marriage cools and stiffens.

“It looks bigger than I remembered,” Ted says behind her.

Sylvia turns around, faces him from a few stairs ahead, a rare occasion of towering above him. “When were you here?” she blurts.

Ted looks up at her, confused. He points to the top of the stair. “On Monday—there, I installed the baby gates. I carried the gee-up horse up the steps—”

Sylvia’s face burns. Of course: he came on moving day. She’d barely noticed him in her excitement, the Yeats’s plaque, her prize, pulsing its blue gleam all the way onto the footpath. The coveralled movers were stumbling about in the dark corridor, the electricity mysteriously not turned on, and then the front door blew shut, locking the keys inside the flat. There was a scramble through a window, and she’d lit candles so the movers could unload the van while she drove to the Electric Board. Ted had stopped by to check on Frieda and Nicholas; they’d set the zoo date, and Sylvia started the car. She had no idea he’d come inside, or that he’d helped. She’d assumed the movers put up the gates while she was gone. She feels so stupid. Already, the sands shift.

“I forgot,” she mumbles, drawing herself up. “It was so hectic.”

“I peed in the potty,” announces Frieda, butter-faced at the landing.

*   *   *

So this is how it’s going to be from now on. It’s not terrible, Sylvia thinks. It’s predictably awkward. It’s bloodless. The scene in her kitchen mimics the unremarkable: her family gathered in the stark light of breakfast. Nick’s high chair is pulled close, and he’s painstakingly mouthing a thick slice of banana bread, smearing it into a featureless shellac on his tray. Ted sits beside the baby at the small square table, Frieda on his knee eating a piece of bacon and listening to a story in her father’s deep, legato rumble.