It was winter when Laura left her husband without warning, and summer when she returned. A livid evening, fluorescent sunset; she was standing, dazed by the heat, outside her house. The curtains of the house were only half drawn. The living room was illuminated by a corner lamp and scattered with the detritus of the life she had disappeared from. Her grandmother’s rocking chair, the battered piano, the mirror with a crack in it. The rug that harbored moths. She did not remember where she had been.

Unlatching the gate, she hovered by the front door. It grew dark. The neighbor next door came home and ignored her. Laura shuffled from foot to foot. She knocked eventually, when the air became too cold. Her husband appeared from somewhere newly mysterious in the house, as quickly as if summoned, but did not acknowledge her except to hold the door open, just long enough for her to slip inside. She wondered if he had been waiting. There would have to be atonement, some reckoning—she braced for it—but he didn’t seem to have the appetite for it.

In the bathroom she took her time, brushing her teeth with an unfamiliar toothbrush found in the drawer. In the same drawer she counted three different brands of condoms. Then she went to bed and waited for him.

For the last six months she had been alone in a pale, large house. The house had many rooms and was on a small island in the middle of a lake. It had been like living on an ice floe. In the back garden of the house was a maze made of marble, the walls high. She was afraid of the maze, but also drawn to it. When she approached it, she could sometimes hear the voices of other people inside it, though she never saw another person there.