Petit Fours

Jenah Shaw

Here’s a strange one: Early on a Thursday morning, late spring but not quite summer, Livy—age twenty-three and solitary, generally ignored or more openly reviled by everyone in our office—turned up on my doorstep. I’d ignored the first knock. Nobody ever called for me. I had the bottom rooms in a house so carved up over time that it resembled the grand villa it had been only from the outside, and then only from far away. To get to my door, you had to go down some rotting stairs around the side and into a grim little alcove, which is where I discovered Livy, squinting at the weeds that thrust out—so irrepressible with life!—from the cracks in the concrete path . . .