Sara was cleaning his kitchen when he got home. The landlord crouched on the porch, maneuvering glass and applying spackle.
“Sorry this had to happen,” the landlord said. “Like I said, things should be looking up pretty soon.” He nodded down the block where a backhoe sat in an empty lot.
Sara was making soup. “Your house is filthy,” she said. “You’re in charge now, you know. It’s not going to clean itself.”
The kitchen counters gleamed with lemon-scented spray; the blood was gone from the bathroom. The house smelled of chicken soup and spackle. Even the wind had died down. The trees looked resigned.
“There are no more mysteries,” he said to the landlord.
“Yes, yes,” the landlord said, closing his toolbox. “It’s an exciting time.”
Sara had a plan for the old computer.
“I know a guy who will wipe it clean,” she said. “Get it running again, just like new.”
She made him unpack the rest of the towels, so she’d have a box to carry it in. He’d forgotten how many towels he owned. It was a dragon’s hoard of towels.
“You backed everything up, right?” she said, touching the back of his head. “You’re really pulling through. Less weird rambling every day.”
He hadn’t backed up the computer, not in years. Maybe never. He didn’t even own a backup drive. He tried to remember the photos and songs and A15 forms, and it seemed like that was how life worked. You knew you were losing things, almost constantly, but you weren’t really sure what they were. He expected Sara to have something to say about that, but she was wrapping a cord around the keyboard. Their thoughts were trapped in their heads. Who knew what anyone was thinking.
She opened the door to leave, and he fingered a dent in the doorframe he’d always wondered about. One day, another man might notice how the spackle on one window was different from the others, but he would never know why.
William sat with his laptop and filled out his spreadsheets. Outside, the branches cracked and rattled, but he didn’t jerk his head. He knew better than to try to catch a strange shadow, a vine in a corner where it didn’t belong. The forest was just a forest. His computer was just a computer. He and those crooked homes at the bottom of the hill had nothing in common, and soon they never would.