She rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room and watched Phil leaf through his Journal. He was a dedicated stockbroker, unappreciated by his boss at Stevenson and Sons, eager for a promotion. He loved analyzing straight rows of numbers and diagnosing monetary ills. She walked up behind him. Why could he not, for just one minute, pretend to care about her project? He’d flunked what she considered a listening test—if he was really paying attention, he would have heard Nick’s name.

She walked to her sunroom office with its rolltop desk. Eighteen years before, when the moving truck had pulled into the driveway of the house—a home she’d been watching and admiring—she’d placed the box labeled AMY’S OFFICE in the sunroom before anyone else could claim it, before a box labeled LIVING ROOM or MOLLY’S NURSERY or JACK’S TOYS landed on the antique brick floor. The minute the real estate agent had ushered her into the house, she’d gravitated to the sunroom she’d stared at for months, knowing she belonged in it.

The house had never had a FOR SALE sign in the front yard. Before they’d moved in, they’d lived in a quiet town house on the other end of Magnolia Avenue, the main street trimmed down sides and center with trees. Every day she’d take a walk down that street, first pregnant, then with a stroller, then with a double stroller, and stop in front of the 1800s house with the glazed and peeling iron gate, the brick with its crumbling mortar, the tilted front porch, yearning for something unnamed surrounding the house. There was a separate longing that accompanied the desire for the house—a longing for a home, a real home with creaking floors and marks of the kids’ heights on the kitchen doorframe, with scraping screen doors that didn’t close properly and probably never would.

One day on her walk, while Molly screamed (as she had through the first seven months of her life), Amy picked her up out of the stroller and stared again at the house—imagined herself in the sunroom: typing, writing, drawing, reading . . . God, even sleeping, which it felt like she hadn’t done in months.