In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, there’s a twenty-page chapter where the characters disappear from the stage. Time passes in the 1920s, and we witness their summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, begin its return to the Earth. That same decade, outside the world of novels but a sure-footed setting for one, a small red brick house was built up the hill from Kempenfelt Bay. A century later, it will be forked from the ground—expropriated for a freeway expansion in a sm