Rachel wouldn't answer his texts or calls, which resulted in a mental fugue he equated to withdrawal (or at least how he imagined withdrawal would feel, minus the shakes and vomiting). He didn't want to know what she'd told their folks in Ohio. To be fair, his polemic would not have seemed so out of place in some of the mega-churches around Amesbridge, but his parents knew better. Their impending call filled him with dread.

For the next week he didn't leave the house, not even to splash in the pool or stroll the beach, the pleasures of which he felt he did not deserve. He gave himself access to all of the mansion's twenty-six rooms but only as an ascetic, sitting on the floor at eye-level with the tufted couch cushions and sleeping in fits, first on the kitchen's herringbone parquet, and then on the dining room table like some kind of perverse roast. He spent a lot of time admiring the high, ribbed ceilings and sticking his face in corners previously overlooked.

How had he never noticed the racist undertones of the pagoda-printed wallpaper in the first floor powder room—and how many of their guests had?

Why had Robin's father collected so much effing scrimshaw?

It bothered him that, despite its location, the house was almost entirely devoid of sand or dust, so when the cleaning ladies stopped by for their usual appointment he drove them off with an unconvincing coughing fit and complaints of the flu.

At night, he swore he could feel the house breathing, the low brontide of its heart vibrating up through the floorboards into his feet. His prayers were long, labyrinthine invocations that pulsed in time to the phantom heartbeat. One enormity after another wrapped itself about him—the house, the water, other things he had no words for—and he asked God if He left any place in the universe wholly in darkness, just one place the way things were before. When Robin came home Thursday night, he checked almost every room before he found Shep sitting cross-legged on the widow's walk outside the third guest bedroom, eyes trained on the horizon. Over Chinese takeout, Shep told his husband he wanted to move back to the city come fall, see if Saint Raymond's still had an opening, maybe split his time counseling at shelters and hospitals.

"This house should feel like an escape, not exile," he said.

"You're happy, I'm happy," Robin said.