This story is excerpted from the novel What Came West by Josh Weil, available from Random House on June 2, 2026. My parents chose her for a maid because she was a mute. Hoping that without a voice she might be half the presence of anyone else. Even less if she avoided me, as they surely instructed her to. By then they had long since become accustomed to my inability to withstand proximity to others. Tantrums, they’d called them when I was young. Fits that would come over me, caused by something simple as a scent: bread rising on an afternoon of baking with my mother, and my father barging in reeking of his veterinary work, lighting a pipe. Or I might be waxing boots, lost in the whisk of cloth on leather, only to hear my mother’s humming break through my peace and feel another coming on. By four or five I’d already grown to recognize the flare at its first flicker, when seized by a terror that those around me would see it too I’d grasp for any way to keep it tamped inside. Might force …