The Art Department closed down during the summer, so at the end of the semester I packed my belongings into boxes and stowed them in Celeste’s basement, as though I might be gone for some years. I was ready at last to make my longed-for pilgrimage back to Spain.

That spring my grandmother Edith died.

One dark overcast afternoon, branches blatting against the window, Seely spread out her palms on the cold glass, extending her fingers across the landscape, and thought of the shabby little mortuary where her grandmother was laid out.

Like most people with fibromyalgia, I have the sleep disorder that generally accompanies the syndrome; typically, fibromites can’t sustain level-four sleep, when muscles are repaired and the immune system replenished. Instead they pop back into level-one, or Alpha, sleep—or…

Celeste was a friend of my mother’s—a social-worker colleague at Herrick Hospital. My first impression of her when I met her at a party she threw was of coldness. But then my mother told me a story Celeste had confided in her about her troubled first marriage to an army officer…