Summary

Autumn arrives at the abbey on Ash Wednesday, and the narrator marks the season’s change through small sensory details, including the sound of cockatoos at the birdbath and the lingering echo of mice in the walls. Her thoughts spiral into a remembered story from her hometown about a young man who shot his parents after an ordinary domestic refusal, and she imagines the court scene that followed. She prays for him and reflects on how little outsiders can know about what happens inside families.

The narrator continues to live through the last phase of the mouse plague, sleeping in the humming darkness while listening to movement in the roof and feeling her hatred sharpen rather than fade. A line displayed in the hallway about everything being well becomes both a comfort and a provocation as the infestation makes the abbey’s language of...