The trip back was uncomfortable and jarring, like that moment you wake from a dream and have no idea where you are, what is real. The air in Atlanta was humid and warm when their plane landed. As the taxi drove them away and sweat began to stain her pink silk dress, Eby kept turning around as if winter was just behind them, still in view, as if she could still see swirls of Amsterdam snow.

They didn’t stop by their house first. George had bought the place, a neoclassical mansion that had once belonged to a mayor of Atlanta generations ago, in the months before they married, but they had never actually lived there. They’d slept there on their wedding night, on a bundle of blankets in the dining room in the cavernously empty home, laughing just to hear the echo and jokingly calling out to any ghosts. They’d left for Europe the next day. They’d sent home enough furniture from their honeymoon to fill the place, and Eby had imagined, when they eventually returned, that her days would be spent going through crates and remembering their trip fondly. She would carefully decide what would go where, which memory she wanted in the study, in the hallway, in their bedroom. It was what was going to make being home bearable.

What had actually happened was that her sister, Marilee, had used the key Eby had given her in case there was an emergency (Marilee’s suggestion) to make the house her own in the eight months George and Eby had been away. Soon after they’d left on their honeymoon, Marilee’s husband Talbert had been unable to pay their rent, and they’d been kicked out of their apartment. Marilee had then decided that it would be okay to move into George and Eby’s home. It had just been temporary at first, but the longer George and Eby had stayed away, the more comfortable Marilee had become.

Thinking back to the letters Eby had received in Europe, she’d thought it odd how many of her friends had told her how beautiful the house was. Eby had assumed they’d meant from the outside. But they’d all actually been inside. Marilee had been throwing parties there nearly every month. And she had unpacked all the crates of furniture that had been delivered and had decorated the house herself.