Children are still out playing outside the pattern-book houses in this quiet corner of Winchester County as the taxi pulls in. The old driver and his pompous Packard would have drawn their attention, but they ignore this lesser vehicle and continue to prance and sing. Life—or not living, and keeping to the shade—is so much easier in this age, when anonymous transports run everywhere, and there’s nothing that can’t be summoned, hired, used, and then disposed of. There may even come a time when humanity itself becomes redundant. And what then?

Beyond the twilight path leading up to a porch, and past the chant of sprinklers, a button causes a shimmer of chimes through a pebbled glass door.

The architect’s widow, Iris Tildsley, is surprised and flustered in her twinset, beads, and clacking shoes by the arrival of the unexpected guest. In a sunroom which faces west across hedges toward a bruised sunset, she offers coffee and lurid-looking cake. The photograph of her husband on the wall already looks faded. After all—and time can still be so surprising—it’s been years.

“The service—it was lovely. Even without, well, you know, any casket. And at least Neville did manage to see the finish of that building of his.”

My building, the guest thinks.

“And, I mean, until after it happened”—she drags her tweed skirt so hard over her knees the hem gives a stuttering tear—“I’d no idea he had any life insurance at all.”

Although everything about this house—the ugly ornaments along the hallway, the dusty gloss of the parquet, the Premier Spic-Span vacuum cleaner in the cupboard below the stairs—whispers of defeat. No need now to take on the cleaning jobs she had back in the city. There are fundraisers and coffee mornings instead, where she faces distant sympathy from the other woman, and quiet mutterings about how her husband must have been well and truly blotto, to drive his car right off the Harlem swing bridge like that, not to mention the shame of them not even being able to find a body.

Scenes, opportunities, of submission or resistance, play amid the slow rise of the guest’s need. Iris Tildsley’s blood would taste of gin, barbiturates, and tears, and her husband’s fatly boyish face would briefly loom before her life was finally released. But the scenarios all seem clumsy. She’s mostly dead already, and confesses she’s taken to standing on the parapet on the Macombs Dam Bridge and staring down at the Harlem River, which she believes bore her husband away. Soon, surely, she will find the courage to leap.

“But have I told you how very grateful…”

“Yes, you have. Many times.”

Night is gathering and bats flicker about the streetlamps as the waiting taxi turns to bear the guest back toward the city’s glowing, beckoning roar.