TWO HOURS LATER, SCOTT DROVE THEM HOME in Owen’s truck, a putty-colored Ford F-150 of uncertain age whose alignment scraped and dragged as if it had been slammed into a tree and repaired just enough to keep it running. Owen had passed out in the passenger seat, cheek flattened against the glass, while Henry sat buckled in between them with his small hands folded on his lap, staring out the bug-flecked window. The boy had hardly touched his cheeseburger during dinner and spoke only when Scott asked him direct questions about school or movies he’d seen lately.

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Henry said finally.

Scott nodded. “In the morning.”

“Why can’t you stay here?”

“I have to go back to Seattle.”

“Why?”

“It’s home.”

The boy fell silent, powerless before the logic of the statement. “I could go with you,” he said in a small voice, as if he were afraid Owen might hear him. “I could live with you.”

“Think you’d like it out there?”

Henry considered, then nodded.

“Not too rainy?”

“I like the rain.”

“I don’t think your dad would like it so much.” The truth was, upon first meeting his nephew, Scott had thought of little except how it would be if Henry were his son and not his brother’s. Henry’s mother wasn’t part of the picture. She had been a local girl, the daughter of someone’s housekeeper, with no interest in raising children. From everything Scott had seen, his brother had taken the anger and humiliation of her desertion out on Henry, pretending the boy didn’t exist or criticizing him for being clumsy, lazy, or disrespectful.

Once or twice in the last four days, usually after several drinks, Owen would embrace his son with gruff affection, a crooked hug or beery kiss that would bring a cautious smile to the boy’s face before Owen lost interest and drifted back to whatever he was watching on TV. Then the boy would sit with him on the couch or on the floor, watching Owen with a child’s clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, loving his father but never fully trusting him.

Scott pulled into the driveway and parked, rousing Owen with the silence where the sound of the engine had been. “Thanks for dinner, bro,” he muttered, climbing out and ambling up the walkway to their parents’ house. Scott and Henry followed, the boy looking as if he wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure what. In the living room, Scott heard the TV switch on, followed by the scrunch of compressed couch springs and, seconds later, the rumble of deeply sedated snoring.

“You want to come upstairs and help me pack?” Scott asked, and Henry responded by following him up to the sewing room, installing himself on the single bed with his legs dangling off the end. Something was on his mind: something that took a moment to find its way out.

“Was Grandpa crazy?” Henry asked. “When he died?”

“He had a disease that made him forget a lot of things.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

“Right.” At first, Scott had been floored by his nephew’s capacity to seize on a name or concept upon hearing it only once; now he simply accepted it as part of some inexplicable cosmic whim. “People with Alzheimer’s can’t really take care of themselves. They’ll walk away and forget where they live or forget to take their medication.”

“My dad says Grandpa used to cry a lot.”

Scott paused to weigh his answer. “I think it’s been hard for him since your grandma died. He probably spent a lot of time feeling frustrated and confused. It’s hard to understand, even for grown-ups, but there are times when it’s better to let go of life and find some kind of peace—even if it makes the people around you sad.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Henry was looking past him, at the laptop on the sewing table. “Do you have any games on your computer?”

“I might.” In fact, the same day he’d booked his flight to New Hampshire for the funeral, Scott had gone to Best Buy and purchased a dozen games designed for elementary-age kids, patiently installing them on the computer’s C drive, one after another. Henry found one that he liked, something about hunting robot sharks from a speedboat, and sat down to play.

At ten o’clock, yawning, he slipped down from the chair and lay down on the air mattress where Scott had spent the last few restless nights. Within moments, he’d rolled onto his stomach and was breathing deeply into the pillow, one arm flung up above his head. Scott slipped Henry’s sneakers from his feet and drew the blanket up over his shoulders, paused, and after a moment, bent down and kissed the boy’s cheek just above a dried ketchup streak.

At length, he found himself picking up the manuscript with his father’s name on it, scowling more at the existence of the pages than at what they might actually convey. He opened the drawer of the sewing table, brought out a pair of his mother’s old pinking shears, and snipped the twine. The sheets of paper, long bound together, were released with an almost audible sigh.

Peeling back the title page, Scott glanced at the first typewritten lines:

Chapter 1

From the outside, the house appeared completely normal.

My father wrote those words, he thought, a low-wattage tremor running down to his fingertips. Without realizing it, he’d already continued reading:

They had followed the dirt road at least a mile through the woods to get here, and Faircloth hadn’t gotten a good look at it until the real estate agent stopped to open the iron gates. It was a tired old relic from some other time, smooth where it should have been angular, angular where it should’ve been smooth, at least a hundred years old, with sprawling wings and dormers and porticoes that seemed to have been added on as afterthoughts. There was nothing beautiful about it. But it was in his price range, which by itself made it exceptional.

The interior, however, was where it all changed.

The real estate man stood back, letting Faircloth wander into the foyer, where something caught his eye.

“These corners,” Faircloth said, pointing.

The agent smiled in anticipation of the question. “Yes?”

“They’re all rounded.” Faircloth squinted up where the walls and ceiling came together, not in sharp angles but in edgeless curves. He looked down at the floor. It, too, blended into the walls without any definitive line of demarcation.

“Most people don’t notice that right away,” the agent said. “You’re a very observant man, Mr. Faircloth.”

Faircloth, who didn’t consider himself particularly observant but recognized a salesman’s flattery when he heard it, continued to inspect the rooms.

“Look all you want,” the agent said. “You won’t find a single true angle or straight line in the place–an eccentricity of the original designer. The effect is quite singular. If you get out a carpenter’s level, you’ll discover that the walls and ceilings, even the windowsills and doorways, all have a slight inward curve. Hence the name of the property.”

“What’s that?”

“Round House.”

Faircloth snorted. Entering the dining room, he found himself standing in front of a doorway that seemed to have no place in that particular spot. He paused in front of it, resting his hand on the brass handle, and that was where he stopped. Despite the August heat wave, which this afternoon had brought the temperature throughout this part of New Hampshire well above ninety degrees, the handle felt ice-cold.

“What’s this?” Faircloth asked.

The real estate man didn’t answer immediately. Perhaps he’d been woolgathering and needed a moment to catch up. “That? Another closet, I suppose. I haven’t looked in it myself.”

Turning the handle, Faircloth opened the door and looked inside. At first, he had been sure that what he would find would be a closet, with an empty metal bar and a few forgotten wire hangers, some old newspaper laid across an upper shelf, or maybe just another small, rounded-off room.

But it wasn’t a closet.

And it wasn’t a room.

Opening up in front of him on the other side of the door was a long, narrow hallway with black walls and a black ceiling. It appeared to go straight back, perhaps twenty feet or farther, before ending resolutely with a plain black wall. There were no wall sconces or fixtures in the hall, but with the natural sunlight streaming through the dining room to his back, he could see quite well that the hallway in front of him had no doors or windows either, that it just ran its course and stopped.

“That’s strange,” the real estate man said, from immediately behind him, and Faircloth jumped and looked back, feeling silly at his startled reaction.

“What?”

“You don’t even notice it from the outside.”

Without bothering to reply, Faircloth stepped into the hallway, sure that he’d overlooked a closed window or doorway in there upon first glance. A hallway without windows or lights was poor planning; a hallway without doors simply didn’t make sense, even in a place as decidedly eccentric as Round House.

But there were no doors. He walked the length of the wing, running his fingers along the smooth walls, wondering if the previous owners had sealed the doors shut and plastered over them, but he felt nothing. It was almost as if the entire addition had been built for the sole purpose of being shut off, walled away from the rest of the sad old house.

I’ll read just a little further, Scott thought, in the silence of the sewing room, and I’ll go to bed. He flipped the page, his eyes already moving over the words he found there.