The first thing she noticed missing was the coffee maker, on the fourth morning, because by then I was already three states away. What she did not know, what neither of them knew, was that the deed had never left my name. Dashiell had asked me two years earlier to transfer it to him for the taxes, and I had said I would, and I never had, because something in me had waited even when I did not know what it was waiting for. The house was mine. It had always been mine. The tenant was a fiction Marisol invented and I let her keep it for exactly as long as it took me to pack.

I went to the cottage in the Hudson Valley that Ambrose and I bought in 1994 and rented out ever since. The last tenant had left in August. I did not tell my son where I was going. I left a note on his father’s table that said the mortgage, the oil, the insurance, and the internet were all in my name and would be cancelled at month’s end, and that if he wished to keep living in my house he was welcome to pay me eleven hundred a month, and that fair was fair.

He called on the sixth day, after the oil ran low and the insurance lapse notice arrived.