A mover stopped in the front hallway with a box. “This isn’t labeled.”

“Of course it is,” Suzanne said. It wasn’t. “Put it in the master bedroom.”

“Isn’t one,” the mover said.

“Excuse me?”

“There isn’t a master bedroom.”

“The bedroom to the immediate right at the top of the stairs.” It was bigger.

“Mommy! What’s this word?” Adam pointed to a page in his book.

“This light was already cracked, right?” A mover held a tiny Tiffany-style table lamp aloft like a torch.

The lamp from her childhood night table. Her father told her he’d be home from his business trip before the bulb burned out, but that bulb and another burned out before she understood that he wasn’t coming back. Suzanne kept it as a physical reminder of the way life could let you down.

“This chair go upstairs?”

“What?” Suzanne stood, her focus lost. She tried to remember what they owned and why, energy seeping from her like air from a punctured tire.

“Mommy! A stranger!”

A woman stood on the porch with a long squat dog with a fluffy feather of a tail. Someone collecting for a charity? Something green, Suzanne guessed—Save the Seals or the Humane Society. The woman had curly, untamed hair and wore an Indian-print top paired with dangling, arty earrings. She had unusual blue eyes. No, green. She looked familiar. “Can you come back another time?”

“I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood.” She held out an envelope and a foil loaf pan.

Suzanne accepted the offerings, standing awkwardly on the threshold of what she hoped would, one day, feel like home.

GRANT JOGGED AROUND THE GREEN, PAST THE CAFÉ AND THE TOWN hall and the soccer field, where a tai chi class had gathered near the goal, the students’ movements eerily slow, like plants moving underwater. He ran past the tennis courts and the children’s library and down a side street. He timed a loop, imagining how familiar it would become after running it every day. He would come to know every tree and every dog, every mailbox and every streetlight.

He sprinted over the creek to Willard Park’s little shopping area, where the market and the hardware store, Mitchell’s Variety, and a few other stores were lined up, awaiting customers.

He tapped his fitness tracker, eager to see his heart rate, and nodded, pleased. His pulse was famously slow, unlike his wife’s—Suzanne’s heart raced. He bought a bottle of water at the market—more gourmet shop than deli with its foreign chocolates and extensive wine selection—and stretched his Achilles tendons on the curb before heading around the gold SUV that was parked out front with its hazard lights on, and into the hardware store.