The house itself worked in layers. The outer ring was the veranda, which was dotted with large cane armchairs that were perfect for snoozing or reading. My mother had never really used them, from what I can remember, and neither did I. The next ring was after you step inside the front door—the open corridor that led to our rooms. The walls were covered in my mother’s artwork. I’d never let Seetha even think about removing any of it. My mother had been an avid painter, even if her subject matter was gloomy and depressing. Six-by-four-foot canvases of women weeping—heartbroken and alone. Tears streaming down their faces, which were twisted in despair. I asked her once why she painted them, and she must have told me but I can’t remember her answer. I was too fixated on the realization that the women all had her eyes.

Then there were the rooms. My mother’s on the left and mine on the right. I’m sure Seetha would have cleared out the medical equipment and hospital bed from my mother’s when we were renting out the property, but I’d never gone inside to check for myself.

And finally, the last ring. The epicenter around which the house had been built. A spacious open courtyard sat right in the middle of the house, where a large Araliya tree spread its branches. When the flowers bloomed and the smell wafted through the house, it was like my mother hadn’t left at all. It was her favorite flower, and my father had it planted just for her. The first tree had died, my mother told me, shortly after they moved in. She said she should have known that they were doomed. But my father had loved her then, and planted another, announcing that it was a good omen when it finally took root. That sometimes, all anything needed was a second chance. Well, he certainly got his.

I don’t remember much of him. He’d realized soon after I was born that life in Colombo wasn’t really for him. Or maybe it was life with my mother. Or maybe it was me.

But it hadn’t taken him too long to set himself back up in England, where he was from. And of course my mother was to blame. She was the one who ran away from home to marry an Englishman against her parents’ wishes, after all. She was the one who couldn’t keep her man happy. She practically asked for it.

And when she got sick he left for good. He took care of the expenses, and he left her this beautiful, haunted house full of weeping women. All the fight my mother must have once had in her was already spent on leaving her family and living the life of a high-society outcast in Colombo. She was swept away with her cancer on a wave of painkillers much sooner than the doctors expected.

And then there was just me. And Seetha. And this house I never wanted to stay in for a moment longer than necessary but kept coming back to just the same—like I was a ghost cursed to haunt these walls.