Chapter 4

The house was quiet in a way it hadn't been all morning.

Ottilie stood in the front hall, her hand still on the door handle, and listened. The ticking of the old regulator clock in the parlor. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The distant, papery sound of the wind moving through the maples outside, the same sound she'd heard every October for thirty years.

The KITCHEN box was sitting on the grass. The radiator was on the porch. The piano was in the middle of the lawn, its walnut case bright in the sun, its keyboard toward the house like an audience waiting for a performer.

Mavis and Lloyd and Nell were still out there. She could hear them through the door — Mavis's voice rising and falling, Lloyd's lower murmurs, Nell's brief single answers. She didn't listen to the words.

She walked through the house instead, room by room, the way she had the morning after Lloyd moved out, eleven years ago, checking that the walls still stood, the floors still held, the roof still kept the rain out.

The parlor had a cold draft from the bay window, the radiator sitting outside on the porch instead of warming the room. She could see the piano through the window, a dark shape against the grass, and she stood there a moment with her hands at her sides.

The guest room was down the hall, facing the river. She walked to it, pushed the door open, and saw the quilt.

Her grandmother's quilt. Pieced by hand from scraps of her grandmother's house dresses and her grandfather's shirts, the pattern an old one called Bear Paw, the colors faded and muted — a blue-gray, a rust red, a dusty yellow — held together with tiny, even stitches her grandmother had sewn in the years before Ottilie was born. She had brought it with her when she married Lloyd, thirty years ago, folded in a cardboard box with the other things she wouldn't leave behind. It had gone on this bed every October since, laid flat and smooth, a marker of the season, a thing she could count on.

She ran her hand over it now. The fabric was soft under her fingers, worn thin at the edges, the stitching still holding. She had carried it into this room this morning, before the truck came, before the piano knocked against the door frame, before Mavis walked through the door and pointed at her house like she owned it.

Ottilie stood in the guest room with her hand on her grandmother's quilt and felt something in her chest loosen, a tension she hadn't noticed was there — a wire pulled tight through her back and shoulders, loosening a thread at a time.

The lease was in the mailbag, which was still on her shoulder. The flat manila folder held the lease, the inventory, and the trust agreement. All the papers that had been sitting in a file drawer in Lloyd's father's lawyer's office for decades, waiting for a morning like this one.

She heard the front door open.

She turned, walked back down the hall, and found Nell standing in the doorway, the sun behind her making her cream sweater glow at the edges. She had the KITCHEN box in her arms.

"Grandma left," Nell said. "She took Lloyd's truck. She said she's going to get a lawyer."

Ottilie nodded. "She'll need one."