When the taxi arrived at the address that used to be ours, Cricket was the first to exit. We stood on the sidewalk and inspected. “Look at that,” Cricket lamented, pointing to the clapboard siding that was once yellow. “Are people supposed to like this color? I’ve never seen an uglier gray. And they took off the shutters!”

“This is what you get when all people care about is cashing in,” Wallis said. “A generic disappointment. A dearth of style. God, I hate it.”

“I like the windows,” I said, and almost immediately I was wheeled on. They were aghast. “The bay window,” I said, ready to defend myself, gesturing to the one that had been shattered by a brick earlier this year. Only January? It seemed longer. “The way they replaced it with—what is that? Looks like black wood, I guess. It’s like a shop window, or something you’d find in an old English Tudor. I don’t mind it.”

“This used to be our house,” Wallis told a young couple who were standing near, clearly admiring the curb appeal. The husband—boyfriend?—gave us a polite smile before being pulled up the steps and inside by his companion, a woman with a straight spine and a no-nonsense expression who clearly called the shots.

“All right, let’s see what else they’ve done to it,” Cricket said. “I wonder if Daisy will like the interior as much as she likes the windows.”

In short: no, I did not like the interior. The renovators had made choices that clearly were intended to dazzle, but had no such effect on me. There was marble, quartz, cheetah-print wallpaper in the powder room, a light fixture that looked like a crown of barbed wire hanging over the dining room table. The kitchen drawers, the agent, short, slicked, blue-loafered, told me, are soft close. They did not keep Cricket’s butcher-block counters.

Cricket and Wallis stood by the fireplace, which had been converted to gas, muttering. I left them to it and ventured upstairs. I ached to hear the staircase creak in the same spots.

My old bedroom was similar and also different. Much like me, I supposed. I had the sensation of looking both backward and forward in time, into my past, but also the future, altered, unexpected, in both good and bad ways. What would my father think of this house now? Easy. He would’ve hated it. Not because of what the flippers had done, but because he hadn’t been a part of the transformation.

This had been his biggest flaw: he’d clung so tightly to the displays he presumed would make him relevant, and needed, and powerful, he forgot about where power truly lay. With us, his family, his wife and daughters, and the happiness and peace we’d found with each other and ourselves.