“All right. We’re taking this armoire,” Hope had announced, “and that’s all there is to it.” It was a reference to both a classic Seinfeld episode and the fact that Lindsay had, in fact, taken the armoire after finding it abandoned on the curb with a “Free” sign taped to it. She discovered later that a visiting professor at Princeton had bought the armoire from one of the vendors at the Antique Center and then ditched it in the front yard at the end of the semester when he decided that schlepping it back to his permanent residence in New York City wasn’t worth the effort.

They managed only to tip the clunky wardrobe onto the floor horizontally before Hope burst out in laughter, wiping her palms on the baggy denim cutoffs she had worn for the move. “Oh my god, it seems even bigger now that it’s empty.” She had tugged her sandy blond hair from the long ponytail at the nape of her neck, shaken it loose, and then pulled it into a sloppy topknot instead. “Gross, I’m super sweaty. How did we even get this thing up here in the first place?”

“You don’t remember?” Lindsay had done her best to impersonate Hope trying to wrangle the thing down the street by herself, one scoot at a time. “Tony made Max and Bobby carry it for you once they all stopped laughing.” Tony and Grace Beckett were Hope’s landlords, and Max and Bobby were their now-grown sons.

A look of recognition had washed over Hope’s face. That’s when Lindsay said the armoire might be trying to send a message that it wasn’t too late to unload the van and stay put. Before Hope could respond, Lindsay had jumped in to clarify. “I just want to make sure you’re a hundred thousand percent certain before we break our backs getting this lead-filled coffin down the stairs.”