He said, “No one’s ever been afraid of me. It would be grand if you were, but I don’t really expect it.”

She had been looking at him, so it was not that the dark regard suddenly shifted or focused on him more intensely, but rather as if he had managed to attract the attention of a forest, or of a large body of water. “What do you expect?” Farrell stared back at her, too tired and uncertain even to shrug, almost peacefully at a standstill. Sia said, “Well, come in, good morning.”

She turned her back; as she did so, Farrell felt a curious desolation pass over him—a fox-fierce little autumn wind of abandonment and loss that might have blown out of his childhood, when sorrows were all the same size and came and went without ever explaining themselves. It was gone instantly, and he walked into the house, following a middleaged woman in a blue bathrobe who moved cumbrously on legs that he knew must have varicose veins.

“Sia’s house is a cave,” Ben had written to him three years ago, having lived with her then for more than a year. “Bones underfoot, little clawed things scampering in the shadows, and the fire leaves greasy stains on the walls. Everything smells of chicken blood and skins drying.” But that morning Farrell thought the house was like a green tree, and the rooms were branches, high and light and murmurous with the sounds that wood makes in the sun. He stood in the living room, studying the manner in which the toast-colored boards of the ceiling went together like the back of his lute. There were books and big windows; mirrors and masks, small, thick rugs, and furniture like drowsing animals. A chess set stood on a low cast-iron table in front of the fireplace. The pieces were of wood, worn almost as round and featureless as the spindles of the staircase. Farrell saw a tall old windup phonograph in a corner, next to a wicker basket full of pampas grass and rusty spears.