The house was not large. The porch rail needed repainting every other year. The guest-room windows stuck in damp weather. The kitchen floor produced a particular creak near the sink that she had given up trying to fix because she had come to think of it as the house identifying itself, the way a familiar voice announces itself before you see the face. Every inch of the place had passed through her hands. The blue-and-white curtains were stitched from clearance fabric she had loved on sight. The yellow quilt in the guest room had been pieced together from twenty years of leftover dress scraps, each one carrying the faint memory of a specific bolt and a specific woman who stood still while Eleanor measured her. Henry’s seashell lamp stood in the hallway, slightly crooked, casting the same amber oval on the floor it had always cast in their bedroom. The place held memory without feeling like a museum, which was a rare and precious thing and one that Eleanor understood did not happen by accident.