That’s not fair, but it takes me a minute to figure out why. “I don’t know yet what I want, because I’m not sure how we would possibly do that, and it’s hard for me to want things I don’t know if I can have. So take a minute and talk it through with me, would you?”
“Oh,” Emily says, like she’s seeing my reaction in a whole new light. “Sure. Of course.”
“How would we do that?” I say again. “We’d need a much bigger house, and I’d really like to not have to move, in case the market goes up again—”
“The kids could share rooms,” she says quickly.
Obviously. My sisters shared a room all growing up, and I didn’t always evenhavea room. A couple of apartments we lived in were so small, I slept on their floor or on the couch. “I mean, yeah, they’d have to. But that means we need at least a five bedroom house, yeah?”
She shrugs. “I think people with less money than us sometimes have lots of kids. But yeah. Five bedrooms would be nice.Though we don’t—”
“Have to have eight. I know. But if that’s what you want, I want to give it to you.”
“But only if you want to.”
I look her in the eyes. “Which is why we’re discussing it, right?”
She still seems nervous about that, but she nods.
“How are we going to afford a five bedroom house?” I ask. “I mean, we might be able to scrape together a down payment, but if we can’t put down twenty percent, the mortgage insurance will kill us.” We both sit with that for a minute. I’m not sure what exactly a five bedroom house costs in LA, never having thought I would need one, but I can guess.
“I could work,” Emily says.
“Do you want to work full time forever?” I ask. “Because that’s totally fine if you do, but if we want eight kids—”
“No,” she admits. “I’d rather be able to stay home with them. Maybe work a couple hours a day.”
I make a good living, but not good enough to support a family of ten in LA. “We could move out of California.” I fly a lot for climbs, anyway, and real estate is crazy cheaper in a lot of other places.
“That would be fine with me,” Emily says, brightening.
But I feel sick. I close my eyes. I want to tell her I can do that, that we can move out of one of the most expensive areas in the nation and make all her dreams come true. “I don’t think I can,” I say finally. Because it’s true, and I need to be honest. “I don’t know that I can leave my mom and sisters.That feels too much like what my dad did to them, even though I know it’s different.”
I expect Emily to argue with me, but she doesn’t. “Okay,” she says. “So we can’t leave California.”
“Right.” Shit. I don’t know that there’s any way we’ll ever be able to afford a family of that size, even if we cut way back.
“I could work more now,” she says. “Take on more clients while wedon’thave kids.”
That . . . might actually help. “Yeah, okay. And I could, too.” I knock my head back against the rock wall. “Ugh, but Nate’s gone. He always had a ton of ideas about how we could better monetize the show, and a bunch of ideas for other things we could produce to get bigger. I was always telling him that you don’t mess with a good thing, but—” I close my eyes. “Damn it, I should have listened to him.”
“I’m sure he’d still help us out.”
“Yeah, but it would have been easier when he was motivated to do a lot of the heavy lifting.” I kind of hate myself now for not taking him up on this stuff. I guess my relationship with Emily isn’t the only way that I’ve been holding myself back with my fear of change. “He wanted to pitch a show to networks. A high adventure show, like the challenge part ofSurvivor.The cast would stay in hotels, but they show up to run rapids or climb mountains and get points for various challenges, and then get eliminated based on who does the worst, like onThe Amazing Race. He wanted to produce it and have me host.”
Her eyes widen. “You would rock at that.”
I wasn’t all that inclined to believe it before, but now . . . Hell, if the Not-Wives can grow through these experiences, then anyone can.
“Maybe I could do it without him,” I say, though I wish I didn’t have to. I know Emily wants to say that Nate might still be willing to do it, but I know why he took that job onChasing Prince Charming. He was sick of waiting around for me to develop ambition.
Something occurs to me. “Hey, maybe we could find a house that’s bank owned. What are those called?”
“A foreclosure?” She looks rightly skeptical about this, but I have more.
“Right, a foreclosure. Something that needs a ton of work, but has, what is it they say on those flipping shows? Good bones?”
“Yeah, okay,” Emily says slowly.
