Epilogue: What I Know Now
I know that a house can hold a life that looks entirely like your life and is not.
I know that the gap between the person you believe you know and the person who exists is not always visible, not even close up, not even after years.
I know that my sister called me at 12:08 a.m. and that I moved before I thought, and that this is the reason I am here to know any of the rest of it.
I know that Noah, at eight years old, has the specific laugh of a person who finds the world genuinely funny rather than performing amusement, and that this is the thing I notice first when he laughs, because it is unambiguous, and unambiguous things have become precious to me in a way I didn’t expect.
I know that the house in Richmond has no attic.
I know that Patricia next door makes better pie than anyone I have ever met, and that she has never once asked me anything I wasn’t ready to answer, which is a form of kindness I have come to understand as rare.
I know that I locked a door once in the dark, with my hands shaking, and stayed very quiet, and that staying quiet saved my life.
I know that the rain sounded the same that night as it did every night — indifferent, steady, the city weather going about its business while everything inside the house was coming apart at the seams — and that I still sometimes lie awake listening to rain on a roof and think about what it means that the world continues so entirely unimpressed by what happens inside the houses it falls on.
It means nothing. It means everything.
I am still working out which.
