“She was independent, even growing up?”

“Oh yes. She wouldn’t let me do any extra for her. When she was in Girl Scouts, every year she would only let me buy three boxes of cookies, like everyone else who was addicted to Thin Mints. She would not accept favors. When she was in high school, her dad managed to buy her a car. I remember her face. She was so excited, but God only knows how illegal that transaction was.”

Mr. Adams’s face grew somber.

“And yet when he lost everything two months later in a Ponzi scheme and had to hock it, she wouldn’t even come to me. She wouldn’t even ask for help to get her car back. Two thousand dollars. He lost a fifteen thousand–dollar car for a two thousand–dollar debt. I carry that much in my front pocket.”

Alarmed, I asked, “Are you sure that’s safe?”

He cast me a warm expression. “You want to know the worst part?”

I nodded even though I kind of didn’t.

“She wasn’t even upset. She wasn’t disappointed. A junior in high school lost her car, and she wasn’t the least bit agitated. She’d never expected to keep it as long as she had, she was so used to being let down. She was so used to being disappointed. She was so used to coming second to everything else in his life.”

“Why was she like that?” I asked, more troubled than I thought I would be. “Why wouldn’t she accept money from you? You’re family.”

“I asked her that once. She told me that she saw how I looked at her dad, at my son, and she never wanted me to look at her that way.”

His last words were so broken they were hard to decipher. He broke down. His shoulders shaking. A strong hand over his eyes.

I let him grieve, knowing that was my cue to leave, but there was one more thing that I didn’t quite buy.

When he recovered enough to continue, I asked him, “Mr. Adams, this is going to be a very indelicate question, but if you have so much money, why are you living in this tiny apartment in a retirement center? I’m not sure I buy the yard work argument. You could afford a hundred gardeners.”

“About two years ago, right after Emmy got her job at the hospital, I decided I didn’t want to waste another nickel on myself and my stupid spending habits. I retired and liquidated everything. I scraped together every penny I had and put it in a trust fund for Emmy. On the day I die, she was supposed to get millions. I wanted it all to go to her.” He broke down again, and it took him a moment to say, “I never expected to outlive her. How is something like this even fair?”

It wasn’t.

After I walked Mr. Adams to the center’s dining room for dinner, I thanked him and headed home. It was late, and smelling the food in the dining room seemed to help my appetite find its way back to me after its recent hiatus. I think it went to Scotland.

Mr. Adams was a wonderful man, and I would be checking on him every time I came to see Mrs. Allen.

11

If one door closes and another one opens,

your house is probably haunted.

—BUMPER STICKER

I walked into the apartment knowing full well Mr. Farrow was there. I felt him as I was walking up the stairs even though we now had an elevator.

After putting my bag down, I sought him out. “I think we should talk about what’s going on.”

He almost looked up from his desk. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Nothing. That’s kind of the problem.”

I wasn’t used to being ignored. Well, actually I was, but not from Reyes, and yet Reyes had been doing that very thing for several days. It was eating at me in the same way a person on bath salts eats at the flesh of others. Strangely and disturbingly.

“Are you seeing someone else?”

I’d shocked him. The look on his face, which I had to rely on because I could no longer decipher his every emotion, told me so. Perhaps that bothered me more than I’d imagined. That I could no longer read him as precisely as I used to. Like an electrical field was fucking with my sensors. Giving me false readings.

“I did have amnesia. I figured you might have found someone else in that time. You know, someone less work and more fun.” My thoughts went to Mrs. Abelson. I’d made fun of her because she was so high maintenance, but maybe I was, too. Maybe Reyes just needed to play video games with his friends and smoke a little weed. To relax. To get over the stress of living with yours truly. I was exactly like her.

“Look, you know if you ever just need to play video games and smoke pot, you can tell me, right?”

“Are you on medication?”