When he was younger, he had said the house smelled like peace, a phrase that had startled Eleanor with its accuracy. He used to sit on the porch steps with a peanut-butter sandwich and tell her that the waves sounded like someone breathing in their sleep, and she had looked at him in those moments with the particular tenderness a mother keeps specifically for the moments when a child says something that reveals an inner life larger than their ordinary conduct suggests. She had thought then that he was becoming someone worth knowing as an adult, someone who might sit with her someday in the good chairs with the good view and be entirely content.