She kept the guest room ready for three years. Fresh sheets on the first of every month. A water glass on the nightstand that she emptied and refilled even though no one had touched it. She'd bought towels — the good kind, the kind you buy for someone else — and folded them over the rack in a way she'd seen in a magazine.
Her mother visited once, early on, and drove home after dinner because the commute wasn't that far. Her friend from college said she'd come in March, then September, then stopped bringing it up. The sheets kept smelling like detergent. The towels stayed creased where she'd folded them.
When her sister finally came — two nights, a Tuesday and Wednesday, between flights — the sister dropped her bag on the floor and the wood creaked. She'd walked through that room a hundred times to change the sheets and never heard it creak. She'd been passing through. Her sister stood still in the middle of the room and the room answered.
After the sister left she found a dent where the suitcase had sat. The towels were damp and balled up wrong. One of the magazines was open, facedown, as if someone planned to come back and finish the article. She didn't close it.
She stopped changing the sheets on the first. The dent in the floor lasted three weeks — longer than she expected for a room that had never been asked to hold anything.