Ted looked like a shadow of himself, and Maja’s heart hurt for him. But each time she wanted to reach out and comfort him, the shock of what he’d kept from her would hit her again. She couldn’t find a way around it; it was just too big. But she also blamed herself. Ted was right about one thing: she hadn’t wanted to know. She’d wanted everything to work out so badly that she’d refused to see what was really going on.

When she wasn’t working at the gallery, where she’d been picking up as many extra hours as she could, she and Ted tried to be civil as they worked together to get their expenses down as much as possible. They went through their purchases one by one, canceling anything that wasn’t strictly necessary for the rebuild, and delaying or setting up payment plans for custom orders that were already in progress. They could keep paying their construction loan for a few more months, but their lease on the apartment was up in September, and it would be difficult to get the money together for a new place if the house wasn’t ready, which was looking unlikely.

Working through the problems with the house kept Maja from thinking endlessly about her problems with Ted, or what would happen to them when the baby came. She saved that for her long, sleepless nights. They’d been on the verge of getting everything they wanted: the house and the baby, a picture-perfect life in a picture-perfect town. And now, despite finally being pregnant, she felt like it was all just beyond her reach. She knew women who were divorced. They survived, she told herself. But then again, most of them at least got to keep the house. It looked like she might lose her house and her husband. They just couldn’t seem to find their way back to each other.

They’d been able to get started on gutting the flooded areas of the house and rebuilding the kitchen with the initial payment from their insurance company, but they’d run through that money quickly, and the insurance company hadn’t gotten back to them yet about the independent report they’d submitted. It seemed criminal that they were able to drag out the process so long, but apparently it was all there in the fine print. Getting desperate, they’d tried applying for a second loan, but it hadn’t come through. “Nothing personal,” their broker told them. “No one can get credit right now.”

Their contractor was making noises about moving on to another project, and Maja was starting to think that they might actually have to put the property up on the market, when they finally got some good news about the case: Finch Properties was offering to take over the work.