He worked slowly, breath held, then exhaled as each seam vanished. The window, which had looked tired and leaky, began to tighten. The frame seemed to sit more squarely. The glass stopped its faint, shivering rattle when the furnace kicked on.

“Gray foam rope,” she said. “You push it into the deep cracks first. It gives the caulk something to lean against. Think of it as the rebar for your weatherproofing.”

Ernest liked to say he’d bought his house for the light. It was a half-truth. He’d bought it for the morning, when the sun angled through the living room’s three tall windows and turned the dust motes into a slow-motion galaxy. But lately, that galaxy had a draft.

This was the poetry. He loaded the gun, cut the nozzle at a 45-degree angle—Dev had been explicit about the angle—and squeezed. The bead of white latex emerged like a steady, unbroken sentence. He ran his wet finger over the bead, smoothing it, pressing it into the crevice. The excess wiped away on the rag. Finger-smooth. Rag-clean. Repeat.

He was not a handy man. Ernest was a retired editor of Latin American poetry. His tools were metaphor and meter, not caulk guns and putty knives. But the draft had become a personal insult.

He scraped away the old, crumbling putty that resembled dried-out bread crust. He vacuumed the dust, the dead ladybugs, the tiny bones of some unidentifiable insect. The window looked raw, almost embarrassed by its own decay.