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“Whose house is it?” I ask.

“Mine.”

I turn and stare at him. “You have a house?”

“I have several.” He glances at me. “This one I’ve never lived in.”

“Why not?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He’s driving with one hand on the wheel, his eyes moving constantly between the road and the mirrors. I’m starting to learn that’s just how he is. That he’s never not watching.

“I didn’t have a reason to,” he says finally.

The house is huge.

It sits at the end of a long gravel drive behind a stone wall and tall iron gates. It’s red brick with white windows and ivy climbing up one corner, three stories high, and it looks like something out of a magazine about old money.

Caleb makes me wait in the car while Leo and two other men go in first. They come back out and nod. Then he walks me up the front steps himself, unlocks the door, and steps inside ahead of me.

I follow him in and stop in the hall.

It’s beautiful. It’s also the saddest house I’ve ever been in.

Everything’s cream. Cream walls, cream carpets, a cream sofa in the living room that looks like nobody has ever sat on it. The paintings on the walls are big, expensive abstract smears in gray and beige. There’s a glass vase on the hall table with no flowers in it. Every surface is spotless. A cleaning service twice a month, probably. There’s a faint smell of polish and air that’s been shut up too long.

There isn’t a single photograph anywhere. No books or shoes, no coats on the hooks except one black jacket. Nothing that says a person lives here.

“Did you choose any of this?” I ask.

“No. It came with the house.” He’s standing by the stairs with his hands in his coat pockets, watching me take it in. “A client signed it over to me instead of paying what he owed. I had the locks changed. That was all.”

“How long ago?” I ask.

“Three years.”

Three years. And there’s one jacket on the hook.

I walk through the rooms slowly. The dining room, with a long glass table and twelve white chairs. The study, with empty floor to ceiling bookshelves. The living room, with that cream sofa and a fireplace that’s never had a fire in it. I can tell, because the grate’s still shiny.

Upstairs is the same. Five bedrooms, all cream. The biggest has a bed made up with hotel corners and a view down across the garden to the lake. There’s one book on the nightstand.

I come back downstairs and find the kitchen.

And I stop.

It’s enormous. White marble counters, a long island with stools, glass-fronted cabinets, a professional range with six burners and two ovens. The kind of kitchen I’ve only ever seen on cooking shows.

The knobs on the range still have the plastic film on them.

I walk over and touch one. The film crinkles under my fingertip.

“Nobody’s ever cooked in here,” I say.

I hear Caleb say “No,” from behind me.

I open the fridge. There’s a bottle of vodka in the door. One lemon, going hard. That’s all.

I start laughing, and I can’t stop. I lean against the fridge door, holding the lemon, laughing so hard my eyes water.