After two weeks of camping out in her sleeping bag in the living room of the cottage, Drue was ready to start feathering her nest.

By seven o’clock Saturday morning, she was unlocking her father’s storage unit. The hinges on the sheet metal door groaned as she pulled it open and flipped the light switch.

“Score,” she whispered as she waded inside. The first things she hauled out to the Bronco were a queen-size mattress, box spring and bed frame. Sweating and cursing, she managed to shove them into the cargo area of the SUV. She returned to the unit and dug out a nightstand and two drawers from a dresser that she recognized as being Nonni’s, which completed her first load.

Drue dragged the furniture, piece by piece, into the cottage, dumping everything in the bedroom, before returning to the storage facility for her next load.

Three loads later, she’d barely made a dent in the contents of her father’s storage shed. She’d easily passed up the heavier, more opulent pieces in the shed, a black leather U-shaped sectional, an Asian-inspired teak entertainment center that took up six feet of wall space, and a commanding onyx-lacquered four-poster king-size bedroom suite. She reluctantly gave Wendy credit for banishing Brice’s fugly man cave furnishings to storage.

Instead she’d settled for whatever could be dragged and shoved into the obliging OJ: a three-piece rattan settee and matching armchair that had been Nonni’s pride and joy, along with a boomerang-shaped Formica-topped coffee and matching end table. She’d found a pair of lamps, with their kitschy bullfighter-ceramic bases, and strapped them into the front seat, along with the settee cushions.

For the last load she took a rickety card table and folding chairs. She remembered how Papi would set the furniture up in the living room for his Saturday-night poker games, and how Nonni would fuss about all the cigar smoke and beer bottles, but still spend the entire day before the game fixing sandwiches and cookies for the big event.

In the years after her parents’ divorce, as she and her mother had moved to and from crappy apartments and rental houses in her youth, Drue had been mostly indifferent to her surroundings. Sherri wasn’t a nester, and neither was she. As long as their home had beds, a sofa and a television—and later on, a place to store her kiteboarding gear—she’d been, if not exactly content, not exactly unhappy either.

Now, though, Drue felt an absurd sense of satisfaction in “setting up housekeeping,” as Nonni would have put it.

In a far corner of the storage unit she’d found some dusty cardboard cartons labeled KITCHEN STUFF in Sherri’s handwriting, and upon lifting the box flaps had been delighted to discover an assortment of battered pots and pans, silverware, utensils, and odds and ends of glass and china.