Ann didn’t want Carol to think she was someone who could be talked into a low asking price, so she’d dressed for their meeting in her most serious work suit, a chocolate-colored alligator jacquard jacket and matching pencil skirt. Not wanting to diminish the impact of her outfit, she left her wool coat in her car, but the house wasn’t heated and she was freezing. It was better this way, she thought. She’d need the sharpness of the cold to get through this.

A strong breeze blew so hard that the house seemed to moan and the door flew open. Ann jumped, as though the ghosts of her parents had breezed in and scolded her for what she was doing. She rushed over to the door and shut it firmly. She needed to list the house before she lost her resolve, and before summer arrived along with all the tourists and their naïve dreams of owning a place on the Cape. She already hated the buyers (whoever they were) who would love the house differently than her family did, free of their complicated history and conflicting personalities, unburdened by all the stuff they’d accumulated across three generations. It felt oddly intimate and wrong to imagine strangers living there, like she was letting them wear her own skin.

She tried to focus on logistics. She and her younger sister, Poppy, would split the proceeds. If they got a good price, Ann could use her share to put some money in Noah’s college fund and move into a bigger apartment in Boston than the cramped two-bedroom they shared in the South End. She was tired of living paycheck-to-paycheck; it would be nice to put some cartilage between the bones, especially since her job was now on the line. Noah had pleaded with her not to sell. She tried to explain to him that it made no sense to hold on to a house for sentimental reasons, although that was an argument that was easier to make from a distance.

Ann opened the door to the “blue room,” the bedroom she’d always shared with Poppy. The twin beds, covered in the ancient crochet bedcovers, stuck out from the wall like piano keys. The room had once been a parlor. When they were kids and they’d finally arrived for the summer, Poppy would bolt out of the station wagon, run inside, and throw herself on her creaky old spring mattress, clinging to it like a life raft. “We’re back!” Ann’s great-grandmother had died in this room the same day she was born, which was how she had escaped being named after a flower herself.