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She walks around it like she’s looking at evidence. She touches the built-in shelf. She looks at the window. She looks at the floor, where there’s a dent in the oak in the corner, deep, like somebody dropped something heavy.

“What’s that?”

“A dumbbell. I was eleven. I wanted to be big.”

She looks at the dent for a long time.

Then she goes to the doorframe. The inside of it, by the hinges. There are pencil marks on it, a whole ladder of them, going up the wood from about knee height to just above her head, each one with a date next to it in my mother’s handwriting.

She puts her finger on the lowest one.

R — 3 yrs.

She goes up them one by one. Four. Five. Six and a half. The year I grew four inches and my mom had to write the date sideways because there was no room. Thirteen. The last one, fourteen, the August before ninth grade, right before we moved across the hall into the new wing.

She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there with her hand flat against the doorframe, under the last mark.

“Why’d you move?” she says.

“My father thought the new wing made more sense.” I lean on the wall. “Bigger room. Its own bathroom. Closer to his study.”

“Did you want to?”

I think about it.

“I don’t remember,” I say. “I don’t think anybody asked.”

She looks at me.

“My mom still says they should’ve stopped here,” I say. “With this part. She says it every Christmas, after a glass of wine. My father pretends he doesn’t hear her.”

“She’s right,” Tessa says.

I look at her.

She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking around the little room at the shelf with the paint worn off and the closet door that doesn’t close and the radiator.

“I like this side better,” she says, like she’s telling me she likes the canned cranberry sauce with the ridges.

I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. I lean there against the wall of a room nobody’s been in for years, and something in my chest does a thing I don’t have a name for, and I let it.

“Can I see the rest?” she says.

And I like that. I like that she wants to know.

“Yeah,” I say.

I show her.

The old bathroom, with the claw-foot tub my mother refuses to let anybody take out. The narrow back staircase, the original one, that goes down to the old kitchen, where there’s still the yellow tile around the sink and a window that looks out at the back door. The spot on the kitchen floor where the table used to be, a lighter square in the wood where the sun didn’t reach for twelve years.

The back door opens onto three stone steps down to the yard. I tell her I broke my wrist on those steps when I was nine, jumping off the top one in my socks in a snowstorm because the kid from down the street dared me to. I tell her about the garage that used to be where the mudroom is now, the old one, with a dent in the door from every puck I shot at it between the ages of six and thirteen. My father had the whole thing torn down when he built. I tell her the neighborhood kids used to cut through our yard to get to the creek, all of them, every summer, a whole parade, and my mother would leave a bowl of freeze pops on the back step.

I tell her about the maple. It was in the side yard, outside my old window, and I used to climb it and my father had it cut down for the addition the summer I turned thirteen. I stood at that window and watched them do it.

I don’t know why I’m telling her any of this.

People come to this house to see the big part. The front hall and the chandelier and the long table. The kitchen with the eight burners.