Easter at 3 pm: solitary in this lukewarm white house with its rococo fireside chairs coated in dirty-white lace-cloth, the Persian rug mute and beautiful like a woeful king—his celebrity: finished.

Hushed walls and the hot draft makes her rounds, sending doors to shift an inch, the loose filth under the bureaus to budge. The maids with heads wrapped in soaked towels laze by the garage tap; a two-second clap of thunder launching a chorus of songs.

My phone, like paperweight lay muted in my bed, beneath the waves of rose-patterned bedclothes, smelling of dead skin and the evenings. My pillows rest by the mahogany headboard, like the small bodies of sleeping babies, collapsed in relief with my paperbacks.

Then the two-second clap of thunder. The smell of earth steam prodding a remembrance in my head: him in his college gym shirt, the tiled porch before the coffee trees, the bottle green weeds, beautiful for the first time.

And I, like a frightened child, turn my head away.