Women Who Stay, 25

Chapter 1 ... Chapter 24

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From the hallway, Janie's condo was unremarkable. There was a worn welcome mat before its beige door, a banal triplet to the neighboring apartments. But once we crossed the threshold, the illusion of a tidy, ordinary life shattered. The two-bedroom apartment was packed to the gills with, to recall Mark's description of the hoard at Hollow Hill Farm, crap.

Though we hadn't found any signs of infestation, aside from some mouse droppings in a kitchen cupboard, there was an overwhelming smell to the apartment. It was the smell of a mildewed book times a thousand. It was rust and rot and slimy autumn leaves. I'd volunteered to help the cleaning team cart discarded items to the freight elevator all morning just to get a break from it, preferring to gulp the stale, fish-fry air of the hallway.

"How could she live like this?" Annabelle muttered, turning in place within a hard-fought reclaimed patch of living room carpet. Jacob heaved a tall stack of mismatched bed linens from the couch and let them tumble over its arm, sitting heavily in their place.

Gordon, sorting through a slumped cardboard box of books across the room, didn't look up. "It's not so bad," he said. "All fits in here, doesn't it?"

His older siblings exchanged a glance. They looked quite similar to one another, with a Mediterranean coloring they had clearly inherited from Antonio. They were thicker-set, sturdy people with a practical fashion sense. Even their haircuts were identically cropped mops of curls, though Jacob's was beginning to gray. Their most notable difference was in personality. Jacob was taciturn with a flat affect, while Annabelle was like a live wire, sparking with visible tension at every turn.

Gordon, on the other hand, was all Janie. He was lithe and blonde with a sickly pallor, not helped by his mint-green polo shirt and the unclean aura of our surroundings. He cried on and off, and kept mostly to himself.

Jacob and Annabelle easily tossed most of what they came across. Ms. Clark's stalwart assistant, a young man named James, frequently questioned their decisions.

"Are you sure?" he asked Annabelle, flipping through his clipboard as she dumped an armful of fur into the wheeled discard cart. "I think that's the mink coat she wanted you to have."

"Do I look like I'd wear a mink coat? Size 2?" she asked, deadpan.

"But the resale value alone --"

"I think fur is vile," she interrupted resolutely, "and I refuse to profit off its trade."

When he thought no one was looking, Gordon snagged it from the cart. He pressed it to his face and breathed in its scent before hiding it behind a stack of his books.

My pile of documents grew ever larger, filling multiple bankers boxes. When James triumphantly prised a clunky Hermes 3000 typewriter from behind a stand of fake plants, I groaned. How was everything going to fit in my Zipcar? I didn't even want to think about hauling everything up three flights of stairs to my apartment, which suddenly seemed immaculately clean in my mind.

The longer I spent in the condo, the more difficult it was to remember the Janie I thought I knew. In the diner, I'd considered her fastidious, genteel, and punishingly organized. I'd imagined her in a tidy cottage with, yes, maybe a cluttered closet filled with vintage tweed twinsets, but nothing like this. I couldn't picture her, in neat kitten heels and blotted lipstick, living here, surrounded by her hoard.

Surveying my dry-rotted inheritance stacked in the hallway, I wondered what else I had gotten wrong.

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Read on to Chapter 26