“How many bathrooms?” I asked.
“Three,” he answered. “One down here, two upstairs.”
Good, good.
“There’s a half-bath in the garage too,” he added. “The husband built a studio there before he died, so he had a toilet and sink installed.”
I hummed and followed him up the stairs. Great, another banister to replace.
As luck would have it, the upstairs had four bedrooms, not three. They were all on the small side, except for the main bedroom. Which could pose an issue when the kids picked their rooms. Mikey wouldn’t want the large one. Big spaces unsettled him if he was alone.
I rubbed a hand over my mouth. I’d want all the kids here. The garage could eventually become a guest studio, maybe. And whoever took the big room would have to share the bathroom, which meant having a sibling coming and going as they pleased.
The upstairs didn’t need any major renovations, thankfully. New wallpaper or paint, sure. The floors would look good afterbeing re-treated. The bathrooms were in decent shape. We’d see what an inspector said. Maybe I could give Reid a call, even though he only worked on commercial buildings.
“I’ll tell you right now,” I said, squeezing James’s shoulder, “I want this place.”
I also wanted Nate to see it. Becausewhat if? I wasn’t naïve enough to believe a house could change the status quo, but perhaps it could remind him of our old plans. We’d talked about wanting a house with more greenery, a place the kids could run around, maybe out of the city… This wasn’t out of the city per se, but it had way more space. This was a forever kind of home.
James smiled. He had a charming fucking smile, that one. He was kinda like me, or what I’d heard all my life, that I was rough around the edges. So was he. But he might be the kindest guy I’d met.
“I’ll get you the Realtor’s information so you can see all the specs,” he said.
“Sounds good.”
From what I couldsee, I’d need maybe twenty or thirty thousand bucks to complete renovations, with the kitchen being the biggest money suck. The time it would take was the problem. Doing all this on my own, while working full time and spending as much time as possible with the kids… Yeah.
This was before even checking for concealed problems. I needed professional eyes on the plumbing and the electrics. I wanted to check the insulation in the roof too, the state of the crawlspace under the house, because I wasn’t moving in to Mold Haven.
“All right, let’s keep our fingers crossed,” I said.
What felt like an eternity was more like three weeks, but the house was finally mine, and I’d get the keys in another two weeks.
Since Nate and I were still technically married, I’d had to involve him early on, and he hadn’t reacted at all in the way I’d wanted. He washappyfor me. No jealousy, no discomfort, no lingering looks of wistfulness.
Fucking asshole.
Even so, I had the decency of wanting to tell him in private when all was settled, so I drove over to his office in DC one cold Wednesday when I could be enjoying a lunch burger with James. Instead, I was bracing myself for anything. When the topic was the kids, it could go either way.
Nate worked in an old building where a whole bunch of shrinks and small business owners rented office space. I walked past a dentist in the lobby, then took the elevator up to the third and top floor. Life coach, psychologist, couples counseling, children’s psychologist, psychiatrist… There.
Nathan Riley
Trauma care
Do not knock on the door.
All the others had fancy abbreviations on their door signs, but not him. He’d spent years and years in school, even when working. He had a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a PsyD. Actually, the life coach down the hall didn’t have any fancy titles either, ’cause it was an Instagram profession. The dude had attended YouTube University.
I knocked on the door.
But I knew he didn’t have a session, so…
He opened the door a few seconds later, and he was holding his lunch box. “Oh. It’s you.”
Gee, thanks.
I frowned.
