His House in Order

Dust-caked moonlight spills through the cracked fanlight of a manor where memory itself is a jealous tenant. A second wife—gowned in chiffon the shade of wounded dusk—drifts along corridors wallpapered with the phantom fingerprints of her immaculate predecessor, while her husband’s gaze ricochets off every heirloom like a spectral metronome ticking out inadequacy. Each creak of oak is a whispered syllable of the dead woman’s name; each ticking clock a gavel sentencing the newcomer to eternal comparison. She rehearses affection in candle-scorched mirrors, her smile a fragile treaty with an army of shadows, until the house’s very oxygen seems rationed by the first wife’s absence. In the library, a neglected sonnet pressed between pages of Trollope bleeds sepia tears; in the greenhouse, a white rose wilts exactly as if obeying off-stage directions. When a thunderclap splits the ancestral portrait gallery, the heroine confronts not her rival’s ghost but the living tyranny of idealization: she smashes the silver-framed likeness, shreds the monogrammed linen, and—on the cliff’s lip at dawn—demands to be seen, raw and unretouched. The husband, stripped of his curated nostalgia, finally discerns the carnage wrought by fetishized retrospection; the marriage re-settles into an imperfect, breathing present, the house exorcised not by exhumation but by the radical act of living forward.