The house looked smaller from the drive than it had in memory, as if days away had taken a private bite from its outline. Rain had come through the night and left the air washed clean, the lawn dark with wet. Elise climbed the front steps with a cardboard box on her hip and a funeral director’s checklist folded into the crook of her elbow. Her hands were steady. Her stomach was not.
Inside, the hallway smelled like lemon polish and old paper. Coats hung in the closet in the same scattered order they always had, as if someone had gone through and replaced each garment with a version that was tidier, softer, less used. The foyer table still bore its oriental bowl of keys and a dried hydrangea pressed flat beneath glass. Small things that belonged to domestic life — a chipped teacup, a moth-eaten scarf draped over a banister — felt like evidence left behind by a person who had been removed in stages.
She'd let the funeral director manage the practicalities, but the box in her arms was for what felt private: Simon’s papers, the things he had sorted before the funeral home came to carry away the larger, heavier absence. She told herself she was ready to do this: to sort, to inventory, to decide. She had always liked order; it steadied her like a rope through dark water. Yet as she crossed the living room, the space where the brothers had sat on opposite ends of the couch and argued about things that were never important until they were, she felt a curious friction behind her breastbone — a hesitation not of grief but of recognition withheld.
On the mantel, a photograph leaned in a plain frame. It was a picture of Simon at a cliff edge, hair ragged in wind, eyes squinting at a horizon she could not name. Beside it, a smaller snapshot showed Elise herself, younger, cropped from the waist up, smiling in a place she could not place. Her smile in the photo was the right one — familiar and private, as if captured by a brother who knew which moment to catch — and yet the background held a pale structure she did not remember visiting.
She set the box down carefully on the coffee table and sat on the arm of the sofa. The house made small sounds: the settling of joists, the muted tick of the old clock above the mantel. Things that had once been so ordinary now felt slightly misaligned, like an instrument tuned to an off note. She told herself to breathe. She told herself to begin.