"This one," I tell the room. "We'll start here."
Four trips to haul everything upstairs. Bernadette stays in the car — she's not a second-floor kind of girl — but Gerald the drill and Patricia the power sander come up with the suitcases because I want them where I can see them. The cookbooks go on the nightstand. Grandma's skillet goes on the radiator, because it's flat and I don't have a kitchen shelf that won't collapse under the weight of cast iron and ancestral expectations.
The bed gets fresh sheets — mine, bought at a rest stop in New Mexico, covered in tiny yellow flowers that have no business being this cheerful. I tuck the corners with the precision of someone who spent years making centerpieces symmetrical for people who didn't notice, and then I stand back.
A made bed. In a room that's mine. In a building that's mine. In a city where nobody knows me, nobody needs me, and nobody is waiting for me to be useful.
The tears come fast and stupid. I swipe at them with the back of my wrist and sit on the edge of the mattress and call Del.
She picks up before the second ring.
"Are you dead?" she says by way of greeting. "I've been tracking your location like a psycho and you stopped moving a while ago. If you're dead, I need to know so I can plan the funeral, and I'm telling you right now, your mother is not doing the catering — "
"I'm not dead."
"Debatable. Send a photo."
I flip the camera and give her a slow pan. The cheerful sheets. The cracked ceiling. The window where late afternoon light does something gorgeous with the original glass, casting wobbly rainbows across the wallpaper.
"Oh," Del says, and her voice does something soft that she'd deny under oath. "Kari."
"I know."
"It's — "
"A disaster. A beautiful, rotting, perfect disaster, and I love it and I'm going to live here forever or until the floor eats me, whichever comes first."
"The floor is going to eat you?"
"My foot went through a board. I'm choosing to see it as the house being affectionate."
"The house is trying to kill you."
"The house is testing me. It's different."
Del goes quiet. Her catering kitchen bleeds through — the clatter of prep, someone calling out an order, the chaos that means she's in the middle of a service and answered anyway. Because she always answers. Even when Matt was still around and I was too busy being someone's amenable girlfriend to pick up her calls half the time, Del answered.
"Okay," she says, and a door closes behind her. "How bad is it really?"
I tap my thumbnail against my teeth. "The bones are incredible. The staircase alone is worth the move. Kitchen is huge, ceilings are original, and there's a garden gnome out front who I've already emotionally bonded with."
"And the bad?"
"Plumbing is questionable. Electrical is probably a fire hazard. Three of the four suites need full rehab. The wallpaper situation is an actual crime scene. And the kitchen range might predate the moon landing."
"So an eleven."
"A very charming eleven."
"Kari." Her voice shifts — the no-bullshit register she uses when someone tries to negotiate her catering rates. "You haverenovation experience in the amount of exactly zero. You have savings in the amount of — what did you tell me?"
"Enough for six months if I'm careful."
"You've never been careful a day in your life."
"That's not — okay, that's fair."
"I love you, you know I love you, but I need you to hear me when I say that this is objectively insane. You quit your job. You drove across the country. You are going to live in a collapsing building and try to turn it into a business with nothing but optimism and a circular saw you named Bernadette — "
