Chapter 7: Not So Sweet Home

Richard offered to watch the kids a couple of times a week if I needed to keep looking at houses. He also told us to use the pool whenever we wanted. We thanked him. The rental was still close enough to his house that the offer felt practical, even if the idea of seeing him more often made my stomach tighten.

We moved in that weekend. The furniture was already there, so we mostly brought our clothes and a few boxes we had shipped to Richards with the rest of the kids’ clothes and the few things we actually needed. Nicole helped label. Michael mostly got underfoot and repeatedly asked whether the new house had a pool. It did not. The place was clean and functional. The kitchen was small. The bedrooms were tiny; there was only one bathroom. It was more like a studio with two large closets that pretended to be bedrooms, but we made it work. It also never quite felt like ours. At night I lay in the unfamiliar bed and listened to the different sounds of the neighborhood—cars, a dog two houses down, the hum of the air conditioner—and missed, stupidly, the way Richard’s house had smelled like coffee in the mornings.