Maja looked around, at the wreck of all of her effort, and felt sick. Her head was pounding, and if the kitchen counter she was leaning against hadn’t been covered in something sticky, she would have laid her forehead against it. It was much, much worse than she thought it would be. Not just the damage, but the unexpected feeling of violation.

She had tried to create a place for her and Ted that would be so perfect that it would justify all of the work that she’d put into it. Not only into the house, if she was being honest with herself, but also into their lives together.

On the surface, each decision was aesthetic—questions of color, or texture, or scale. But it had never just been a house to her. The success of the house was going to be proof. Proof that, even without a child, her marriage was a real, solid thing. Proof that she had made the right choices; that even if she sometimes played second fiddle to Ted’s career, she’d still built something beautiful out of her life.

If they could just wake up, she’d thought, and look out over the water, they could never be unhappy. Away from New York, with its constant distractions, she and Ted would have time to really be together. Over the last few years, between the pressure of Ted’s job and their pregnancy struggles, they’d each retreated into their own private worlds. She’d believed that if she could design a house clever enough to withstand the hundred-year floods, it could protect her and Ted, and their life together.

And here it was, revealed to be nothing but a damaged shell, another thing that she would have to hold together through force of will. She looked over at John, and she could tell that he saw the damaged house only as a new set of logistical problems. She tried to listen to him, but she only caught snatches of what he was saying: “. . . water damage . . . pull out the floorboards . . . check the joists in the upstairs bathroom . . .”

He was asking her something about insurance. She didn’t know the answer and shook her head, trying not to cry. Men could not handle crying. Finally she got the question out: “How much?”

John put his hands in the pockets of his overalls and looked around. “A few hundred?”

“A few hundred thousand? Are you kidding? I think we’re already . . .” She was about to say that they were maxed out on the amount they could borrow, but she caught herself. She didn’t want to spook him.

“It’s just a guess. Like I said, I’ll have to see what’s going on underneath the surface. But most of the fixtures will have to be replaced. We’ll be redoing a lot of the work that we did over the last few months.”