Desmond had rehearsed the reunion for years, and now that he stood at the gate he found the script useless. The house was smaller than his memory had insisted—the porch he recalled as a stage was barely wide enough for two chairs, and the oak that had once thrown shade across the whole yard had been cut to a stump, pale and level as a table. His sister met him at the door. She did not cry, as he had half-hoped and half-dreaded; she only looked at him a moment, then stepped aside to let him pass, as though he had gone out that morning for bread. Inside, the rooms smelled of the same furniture polish, and this, more than any face, undid him. He had prepared himself for grief and for anger. He had not prepared himself for the ordinary, for the way a house could hold its habits long after the people who made them had scattered. He sat where he was told to sit. His sister put the kettle on. Neither of them mentioned the years, and Desmond understood, with a small ache, that this silence was itself a kind of mercy—that some doors are best left shut so that the rest of the house may be lived in.