Outside, the light was beginning to fade. And the steel windows of Highland Park, every last one of them, held the evening inside like a secret.

When the storm passed, she let go. Her palms were bleeding from the grip. The window held.

That autumn, she threw a party. The windows were open for the first time in her memory—all of them, the steel casements cranked wide, the screens removed. The breeze smelled of turning leaves and the last of the roses from Paul’s garden. People wandered from room to room, touching the frames, peering through the old glass.

She did not cave. Instead, she learned them. The north-facing kitchen window had a counterweight that stuck on humid days. The living room’s center casement, the one overlooking the overgrown garden, had a latch forged by a long-dead blacksmith named Anton Koenig—she found his initials, AK, stamped into the steel. She oiled the hinges with linseed oil and prayed to no god in particular that the glass, original as the day it was blown, would survive another Midwest hailstorm.