Two months later, once the papers had been signed, we brought Caitlyn to the Nightingale House.

Nicole was still unsure if Caitlyn would go for the Turret Room, but I never doubted it for a second. She walked through the bedroom door and fell in love. We had a hard time pulling her away from the windows as she looked out over the lake. Her bedroom in Portsmouth didn’t have a closet, so she even viewed that as a luxury. She ran into the middle of the room, stared up at the ceiling overhead, and began spinning around.

Then we showed her the blue guestroom and the master suite. She dutifully paid attention but I could tell her heart was still in the Turret Room. We went back down the hall and stopped in between the doors to the Turret Room and blue guestroom.

“Are we really going to live here?” Caitlyn asked.

“Yep,” Nicole said. “And you can have your pick. You can have the blue room or the other—”

Caitlyn dashed into the Turret Room.

“This one! This one! I want this one!” she cried as Nicole and I watched from the doorway.

“Why this one?” I asked.

“Because I’ll be like a princess in a castle!”

It was so damn cute, I almost had to sit down.

Afterwards, we drove back into Kingsbrook and had milkshakes at a place called ‘Murphy’s’. Well, Caitlyn and I had milkshakes. Nicole had hot chocolate. Murphy’s was like a soda shop out of the 1920s. The namesake was the owner’s black lab, who was sleeping in a bed on the floor by the register. The place was packed but we were lucky enough to grab a booth. Caitlyn watched people passing outside the window and began making up stories for them.

“That’s Mr. Teffelbottom. He’s a scientist that does experiments in his basement,” she said. “And there’s Mrs. Longshanks. People say she’s a witch.”

Nicole and I exchanged a glance. This had been a little bit of an issue with Caitlyn. She liked to tell stories. Most people would have said she had a problem with lying, but since she was our kid, we preferred to call them stories. She also tended to tell them when she was overexcited. We viewed it as mostly harmless. If pressed, she would usually admit that she was just making stuff up. Still, there had been problems at school. After the amazing day we had, neither one of us felt like correcting her. Instead, we tried to steer her back to conversations about the new house.

After our milkshakes and hot chocolate, we got back in the car for the drive back to Portsmouth. No one was anxious to return to the apartment.

We were halfway there when we pulled up to a red light.