He heard nothing when he came through the front door.
This was the first thing — the specific, telling quality of the house at half past five in the afternoon in the weekend after Maryanne had gone to Sacramento, which should have been a quiet house, an empty house, the particular brand of silence that had settled into the rooms over the past several days that he had been, in some part of himself he was not examining closely, quietly accommodating. He had left school at half four. He had stopped at the market for nothing in particular, just the physical act of moving through a public space before returning to a house that had been empty for three days and would, according to the plan as he understood it, remain empty until sometime after eight.
He registered the light in the sitting room
