Jen was pretty sure she knew why she’d dreamt about it. Although they’d found people to rent the home, the tenants had told them yesterday that they were out at the end of the month. After only a week. It wasn’t that the rent was too high, they’d been assured when they tried to bargain with the tenants.

It was The Room.

She and Lane had said nothing, but they’d understood completely. It was why they themselves had left.

What was in that room?

She wished she’d never laid eyes on the place, wished Evangeline had never shown it to them. She still resented the way the real estate agent and the banker had bulldozed her and Lane into buying the house, and she resented the way Lane had made that initial decision for both of them. She had never felt comfortable about the sale, had wanted, had needed, more time to think, and she couldn’t help focusing on how things would have turned out differently if she had put her foot down.

Jen finished in the bathroom, then woke Lane up before going into the kitchen to make breakfast. Through the thin kitchen wall, she could hear the rush of water in their neighbor’s shower next door, but experiencing ordinary sounds this way was reassuring, and she thought for the first time that maybe she preferred to live in an apartment rather than a house after all.

There was a thump against the front door, and Jen popped out to pick up the newspaper that had been thrown. It was being delivered each morning, though they were not subscribers, and she supposed that she should call the newspaper office and let them know, but the truth was that she’d been putting off informing them because she enjoyed reading the paper with her breakfast. Rolling off the rubber band and opening it up, she was surprised to see that the name of the newspaper had changed. Surprised and disconcerted.

The First People’s Montgomery Gazette

After the nightmare she’d had, the bold masthead seemed to purposely challenge her, and she folded the paper back up and put it down on Lane’s side of the breakfast table. She would call and let the Gazette office know that the newspaper was being wrongly delivered to their apartment when they weren’t subscribers.

Lane came out, poured himself some coffee, sat down and unfolded the newspaper, glancing at the top headline. He frowned. “Did you see this?” he asked her.

“What?”

“It says home foreclosures in Montgomery are at a record high, that according to the county assessor, more houses were foreclosed on in Montgomery over the past month than in all of the rest of the county combined.” He threw the paper down. “I guess we’re in our own mini-recession. Which means we can kiss the thought of getting out from under this goodbye.”

Jen thought of her dream.