The heavy wooden door clicks shut, and for the first time in weeks, the silence belongs to me. My back slides down the rough terracotta-plaster wall until I'm sitting flat on the dusty terrazzo floor. It is pitch black. I didn’t have the energy to figure out how to buy a lightbulb to turn on the gas, so the apartment is freezing, smelling faintly of old stone and loneliness. The wrought-iron bed f ...