"I'm never going to live that down," he says, sighing fondly when she rolls her eyes at him. "More to the point, you're not going to let me, are you?"

He takes her through the rest of the first floor, pointing out the parlor and his grandfather's old office just off the sunroom, the den next to the main living room, once filled with the large-screen TV and gaming systems his parents had bought for him over various birthdays and Christmases; trendy gifts to fulfill their own obligations, things they assumed he might use as cachet to find yourself some friends, Danny or couldn't possibly conceive that he might not want in the first place. He misses all of those much less than everything else.

"Most of the second floor, I closed off as much as I was able," he says as they climb the stairs, the wooden treads creaking in a still-familiar tone beneath their feet. "It's where I ran out of money, and most of the bedrooms up here hadn't even been occupied in years. My grandfather's room was the last of them, and even that..." He shrugs. "Once the hospice folks cleared out their machines and the bed and all the rest, there wasn't anything to do but shut the door behind them."