The pack house was different without him in it.
Not smaller. Not heavier. Not the old diminished quality of a building that had spent eighteen years pressing down on the person inside it with the specific weight of a place that did not want her there. The pack house had not changed. The floors were the same floors. The corridors were the same corridors. The kitchen at four in the morning was the kitchen at four in the morning, the lamp making its small circle, the cold at the window, the cast iron pans in their familiar positions.
The difference was not in the house.
It was in how I moved through it.
I noticed this on the first morning, Thursday, one day in, the pack house going about its business with the ordinary rhythms of a household that had a tribunal in twenty-six days and a sig
