Before leaving her childhood home for good, Tina stuffed some of her clothes, an unlit candle that smelled like the sea, and three polaroids of her old teddy bear between her bedframe and the wall, hoping the realtors would not find them. She packed two suitcases of her warmest clothes—anything else was too much to think about—then boarded a stuffy plane across the Atlantic. Eight hours later, she found herself standing in front of a small, two-story townhouse tucked into a dusty alleyway in the East of London. The house belonged to a Lottie Maple, who was apparently Tina’s aunt. That is, her father’s sister, as a man in a pinstripe suit had explained from behind his gold-wire glasses and large oak desk at the social service agency.

The name Lottie Maple did not pull on any threads of recognition, though it made Tina think of a Victorian tapestry and an evening drizzle. She only remembered her dad mentioning his sister during lapses into childhood sentiment or fits of adult sobriety. But, according to the pinstriped man, she had no other relatives willing or able to take up the burden of raising a teenager.

After staring for several seconds at the drying wreath hung from her aunt’s evergreen door, her breath fogging out in front of her, she rang the doorbell. When she could hear nothing from inside the house for five seconds, she rang the doorbell again. And again.

“Alright, I’m coming!” A voice called sharply from somewhere inside. A minute later, the voice called again, although this time it sounded much louder, as if coming from right behind the door. “Who is it?”

“Tina Breadwater. Your niece.”

The door opened a crack, a dour face peering out from the darkness behind it.

“Hm. You’re quite tall for someone claiming to be related to me.”

“I… maybe I have the wrong house?…” Tina sputtered, stepping back to read the number on the door.

“No, no. They did say you were coming today. Come in, come in.” The door opened fully to reveal a short woman, dressed in a white argyle cardigan, eyeing Tina unapologetically. Her ashy hair, pulled back into a tight bun that revealed strands of silver, sculpted her sharp cheekbones and arched eyebrows, lending her a frosty disposition. She ushered Tina in with a quick wave of her hands, already reaching to shut the door as if leaving it open any longer would let in an eternally cold draft. “There is a room for you upstairs: the last door on the right. You can bring your… entire house up there,” she said, eyeing the large suitcases Tina had just carried through the door.

“Thank you, Mrs. Maple,” Tina said.

“It’s Ms. Maple. ‘Mizz.’ No ‘r.’”

“Sorry,” Tina said. “Ms. Maple.” She blinked quickly to adjust to the dim light in the foyer. The only light came from a floor lamp that abstractly resembled a tree, illuminating a woven cylindrical stand that held no fewer than five umbrellas, all of different colors and heights. The walls, papered with stripes, were covered by rows of hanging coats and framed photographs of London, each with a crisp, calligraphic signature on the bottom right-hand corner. In front of the right wall sat a short cabinet, on top of which a line of empty glass vases—each reminiscent of a stained-glass panel—rested. They glistened faintly, like sunlight dancing across the surface of a lake. “Have you lived in London for a long time?” Tina asked.

Ms. Maple let out a chuff, making it sound both elegant and incredulous. “Oh, yes. Though I don’t bother counting the years before; it gives me a headache. Do you need help finding your room?” Tina shook her head. “Alright, then. I’ll be in the sitting room.” Ms. Maple turned and walked slowly out of the foyer, past a flight of stairs, down a narrow hallway, and out of sight.

Tina spent the day napping on top of the crisply folded sheets of her new bed. In the brief moments she was awake, amidst the silence of the fading sunlight and the occasional floorboard creak from below, she grew fond of her new room, which offered a few hours of solitude from the bustle of an unfamiliar city. She catalogued every shelf and empty flowerpot until the room shed its foreignness and the objects within it remained unchanging and definable—welcome constants in her recently upturned life.

Lately, it seemed like nothing was within her control. Everything beyond the room’s four walls felt impossibly vast, a world that had grown more crushingly colossal and labyrinthine with each passing day. She could not think of her parents without something pinching at her heart, so she tried not to think of them at all. The objects around her did not change while she slept, and that was enough to keep her from sinking completely unmoored into the ocean of uncertainty that thoughts of her parents plunged her into.

By the time the sun had set, her throat was dry and her stomach growled, but it took her half an hour to talk herself into opening the door and walking downstairs to find Ms. Maple or something to eat. Tina walked down the narrow hallway she had seen Ms. Maple disappear down that morning and took a right, stepping into a small carpeted room with a floral-printed couch on which Ms. Maple was knitting. Her slender hands worked the yarn between the needles effortlessly. She sat with her back straight, one ankle crossed over the other, as if she were having tea at the Ritz, not knitting in her own home.

Tina felt intrusive sitting down or otherwise announcing herself in a place she barely knew, so she stood in the doorframe waiting to be acknowledged. After a few minutes of Ms. Maple knitting and Tina watching, Ms. Maple detached the needles from the yarn and held up what appeared to be a shrunken pair of pants. She noticed Tina with a start, placing the shrunken pants on her lap.

“Ah. You’ve finally found your way downstairs,” she said.

“I didn’t get much sleep on the plane. I’m sorry if I startled you.”

“It is strange to have someone else in the house; you have reminded me of that. But no, you did not startle me.”

Tina nodded. “Thanks for letting me stay with you. I hope that my being here won’t interfere too much with your routine.”

Ms. Maple waved an arm in front of her as if swatting at a fruit fly. “I mostly knit and make tea these days.”

“What are you knitting?” Tina asked.

“Baby clothes,” Ms. Maple responded, patting the garment fondly, which Tina took as an invitation to sit beside her on the couch.

“What will you do with them?” she asked, drumming her hands on her legs.

“Nothing, really. I just like making them.”

“But why baby clothes?”

Ms. Maple shrugged. “Why jumpers or winter scarves? It is all knitting, is it not?” By the way Ms. Maple pursed her lips, Tina suspected she was not telling her the whole truth, but instead of pressing she took a longer look around the room. White oak shelves lined every inch of wall space, filled with books, carved busts of god-like faces, a large porcelain urn that looked to be of Italian make, an extensive collection of decorative bowls, and a medley of other knick-knacks.

“Where did you get all of this?” Tina marveled, glancing over to find Ms. Maple watching her.

“I used to travel quite a bit, before my hips failed me, and made it a tradition to collect at least one keepsake everywhere I went. That urn I bought in Volterra, during a summer I spent in Italy. It is made from real alabaster, unlike those cheap imitations people like to sell nowadays. And those three swallows are from Lisbon. They were the only three left in the store, so I decided it would be bad luck to separate them. Even now, after 17 years, they are just as glossy and vibrant as when I first bought them.” Ms. Maple spoke quickly and affectionately, pointing to different shelves in the room. Suddenly, she inhaled deeply and rolled her shoulders back, glancing at Tina with faint surprise, as if forgetting she’d brought someone along on her private reverie. “You must be excited to be in London. It is a beautiful city.”

Tina took a few seconds to respond, trying to process everything Ms. Maple had just said.

“I’m sure I am a little bit, but…” Tina hedged, afraid to reveal her true feelings to someone she still mostly regarded as a stranger, yet anxious to share her nail-biting sorrow with someone who had also lost a family member that day Tina lost her parents. Ms. Maple raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Well, you can’t expect me to be very excited.”

“Ah, well of course,” Ms. Maple sighed woodenly, “the situation with your parents. How truly, truly unfortunate.”

“Yes, they are dead. My parents died.” The words were like coffee grounds on Tina’s tongue, leaving a bitter, gritty taste even after they had fallen heavily from her lips. It was the first time she’d said the words out loud. The first time she’d heard them, really. Everyone she’d spoken to had steered clear of the word, as if she would break like glass if the word “dead” came anywhere near her. She was sick of euphemisms, of niceties and palliatives.

Ms. Maple reached up and patted Tina’s shoulder with two fingers. The movement was barely there, feather-light on Tina’s cashmere sweater, and from Ms. Maple’s pained expression she found the action tedious and awkward. She soon resettled her hands on her lap, crossing them loosely.

“So are mine. It just happened to you unfortunately early in life.” Tina’s face heated at her aunt’s brusqueness. Her aunt seemed to think of death as a felted flower in a dark room, content to let it sit there, needing nothing to survive and therefore no one to mourn it. Once Tina made this presumption, a painful ball grew in her throat, and the events of the past two months surged forward, threatening to squeeze out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She swallowed them down, but could not ignore her desire to get some sort of emotion from Ms. Maple, to uncover something that proved they shared blood.

“Are you just as accepting of your brother’s passing?”

Ms. Maple sighed and surveyed the room, pausing on the books and bowls as if seeing them for the first time. “I have a lot of bowls, don’t I? They take up most of the space on these shelves. I really do have a weakness for collecting.” She inhaled, shaking her head and smiling faintly before fixing Tina with her unwavering gaze. “My life has always been a collection of funerary roses.”

Tina waited for her aunt to elaborate, but Ms. Maple had already turned her gaze to the tiny knitted pants on her lap, rubbing her thumbs over the purple yarn. Tina thought of the clothes and the candle and the three polaroids wedged between the bedframe and the wall of a house she would probably never see again. She thought of all the empty vases in Ms. Maple’s home and wondered what the house might look like without them, or what it might look like if they were filled with the roses Ms. Maple said she collected.

From the kitchen came the whistle of a kettle beginning to boil.

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Addison Wood is sick of euphemisms.