I looked at the next canvas. Different date, same small signature in the corner: a single initial and a number that corresponded to the order of completion, I realized, as I moved through the room. They were numbered. Forty-three paintings. I counted them twice.
A door on the far side of the great room led into a hallway, and the hallway opened into a kitchen with a large central island and windows that looked out over the terraced gardens. On the island was a pitcher of water, a clean glass, and a bowl of fruit. Not decaying, not dusty. Recent.
Someone had been here within the last day or two.
The thought arrived without alarm, which surprised me. I should have felt unsettled by evidence of an unknown presence in an unknown house. Instead I felt something closer to anticipation, the sensation of a story already underway, waiting for you to catch up to the part it was keeping for you.
Beyond the kitchen was a study.
This room was smaller than the others, and quieter, its one window looking out not at the valley but at a stand of old pines, their trunks close and dark. The walls here were lined with bookshelves, and on the shelves were books I recognized: Michael’s books. The botany texts he’d read in the early years of our marriage when he was trying to understand my work. The fishing books he’d collected with the enthusiasm of someone who loved fishing and the slight guilt of someone who rarely had time to do it. A worn paperback copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden with a cracked spine that I remembered seeing on his nightstand for years.
He had brought things here. He had curated a version of his life into this room, assembling it piece by piece, and none of it had come from our house, which meant he had gathered second copies, intentional doubles, building a self that mirrored the one I knew and existed in parallel with it.
In the center of the room was a writing desk, and on the desk was a laptop.
It was open. The screen was dark, but when I touched the keyboard it woke, and what was on the screen was not a desktop but a document, already open, already waiting, its title at the top of the page in plain type:
For Naomi. Everything I Should Have Said.
