She slides down to the floor. It’s too much. It’s not as though she has just gone out and bought a purse, or even a car. This is next-level nervous-breakdown stuff. A house is something with meaning, something you build your life around, not something you just buy on a whim. You don’t just go out and get a new life because you feel like your old life is failing. But it’s not another life, she reminds herself. It’s just a business decision. Still, she can’t shake this strange feeling she has, as though she has walked into a film about someone else’s life and she’s trying to remember her lines.

Her throat begins to constrict, her breathing coming in gasps, but she can’t even gather enough energy to pull her elastic or to dig through her purse for something sharp. Instead, she opens her hand and drives her palm into her forehead, smashing the back of her head into the cupboard behind her. The impact leaves her ears ringing, the reverberation echoing through her skull, making her nose itch and her teeth hum against the inside of her mouth. When she closes her eyes, she can see strange patterns of light dancing across her eyelids. But she instantly feels better, more focused. She is a businesswoman, and she will approach this like a businesswoman. Assess problems, find solutions, achieve success.

She opens all the cupboard doors and then closes them, checking for creaks, for loose hinges. She opens that window over the sink and feels a breeze sweep in, warm and smelling of cut grass, of tree sap, of childhood. Westfort really is a lovely neighbourhood, so charming and friendly, so close to nature, with all its little green spaces, Mount McKay watching over everything. All those prospective buyers really didn’t know what they were missing.

She plugs in the refrigerator, hears it hum to life, and imagines the things she will buy to put in it. No string cheese or squeezable yogurt, no four-litre jugs of milk, no warped Tupperware containers full of leftovers. White wine. Smoked gouda. Dark chocolate. These are things potential buyers would want to see, things that would make them picture their lives in this house as being just a little bit better than their lives are now. A vase of tulips. A colourful shower curtain. A papasan chair.

“Hey, Claudia,” she says suddenly, without thinking. “How would you like a papasan chair?” The sound of her own voice startles her in the quiet of the house, and she can hear it rippling through the empty rooms. It makes her happy to think about Claudia, her little ghost daughter, following her silently from room to room, frozen in time at age twelve, quietly watching Katriina as she goes through the motions of making a home, even if it’s not real, even if it’s all just for show.