He did not want to go down there.
He had put her there. And then he did not want to visit the place he had put her.
I tucked the blanket around her shoulders. I told her she was not going back to the basement. I told her the room was hers for as long as she needed it.
She looked at me with the exhausted, grateful eyes of a woman who had spent seventy years refusing to be a burden and had just spent four days being treated as one by a man who measured his authority in square footage.
She told me she was sorry for causing trouble.
I told her she had not caused a single thing.
At 6:15, Gabriel came downstairs for dinner. He sat at the kitchen table the way he always sat, with the particular ease of a man who believed the chair belonged to him more than it belonged to anyone else in the room.
