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“That’s why you like it here.”

“Get the cart, Preston.”

The assembly takes two days, and it’s the closest our marriage has come to divorce proceedings since the green curry incident.

I read instructions. This is not a virtue; it’s triage. You assess before you cut. Preston believes furniture assembly is intuitive – “It’s cabinetry, Luke, humanity has been doing this since the pharaohs” – and refuses the manual on principle until step eleven, when the bookcase he has built has a back panel facing outward and a shelf that exists in defiance of the diagram.

“The diagram is a suggestion.”

“The diagram is the only document in this house you’ve refused to read.”

“The diagram has no words. I don’t take orders from a cartoon.”

We build the PAX together. The wardrobe. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall in the third-floor bedroom, with the drawers and the rails and the shoe shelves, and somewhere around hour two Preston goes quiet – actually quiet, working quiet, holding panels while I drive screws, passing me the right hardware before I ask. When it’s done, we stand it up together, and it settles against the wall with the sound of something permanent, and Preston opens both doors and looks inside at more hanging space than the entire walk-up contained.

He doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Two thousand dollars,” he finally says. “For the entire wall. Floor to ceiling, drawers, rails, the works. My mother once spent two thousand dollars having a chandelier cleaned – the chandelier in my childhood dressing room, which was, until today, the best closet I ever had.” He runs his hand along the rail. “Don’t tell her. She’d have it exorcised.”

There are three screws left over. There are always three screws left over. I put them in the kitchen drawer – the new one, the deep one – next to the takeout menus, the screwdriver, and the contract, and I don’t think about what they were for, because that way lies madness.

Elena assembles her own BILLY in eleven minutes. No instructions. One hand. The other hand is holding cereal. She does it on the guest room floor while conducting a phone call with one of Catherine’s Zurich attorneys, and when she’s done she stands it against the wall, loads it with CPA textbooks, and goes back to the call without acknowledging that anything happened.

Preston watches from the doorway with his hand over his heart, genuinely moved.

“She’s my sister, what did you expect?” I ask him.

“I’m surrounded,” he says. “It’s wonderful.”

Sunday morning, I wake up first.

The house is quiet in a way the walk-up never was – no radiator, no fourth-floor traffic sounds, just old-building quiet. I go down two flights to the kitchen, and the Breville is on the counter where Preston installed it within an hour of us entering the front door, before the bed was even assembled, because the man has priorities.

I make two coffees, and carry them out the garden door.

It’s cold. October cold, the good kind. The garden is a small rectangle of green with a brick wall and one stubborn tree that’s holding its leaves out of spite, and there are two chairs out here that arrived flat in a box and exist now because we built them.

Preston comes down ten minutes later, wrapped in a robe that has no business in October, hair a nest, eyes half-open. He takes the second cup wordlessly, making an appreciative noise. He sits in the second chair.

We drink our coffee in the garden on a Sunday morning.

Neither of us says anything about it. There’s nothing to say that the chairs don’t already cover.

The housewarming dinner is Mamá’s idea, which means it’s Mamá’s operation, which means she arrives at 15:00 with three bags of groceries and takes command of a kitchen she’s never cooked in like a surgeon taking over a strange OR – thirty seconds of orientation, then total authority.

By 18:00 the house smells like garlic and achievement. The table – the long one, the new one, the first table we’ve ever owned that seats more than four – holds pernil, arroz con gandules, tostones, a salad nobody will finish but everyone will say was delicious, and a centrepiece Catherine brought that costs more than the table.

Catherine arrived at 17:45 with the centrepiece, a housewarming gift wrapped in paper heavier than most clothing, and Duchess, who took one lap of the parlour, identified the softest surface in the house, and claimed it. The gift is a silver frame. In the frame is a photograph of the brownstone itself, taken from the street, professionally, at golden hour.

“Every home should know what it looks like at its best,” Catherine says. “So should every person. That’s what portraits are for.”

Max and Jax arrive at 18:00 with a gift wrapped so beautifully it can only be Max’s work – crisp corners, double ribbon, a bow tied with the tension of a surgical knot.

“We brought a supposedly appropriate housewarming gift,” Max says, in the voice of a hostage. “Jax selected it.”

Preston unwraps it. Inside is a wall-mounted singing fish.

“It’s a Big Mouth Billy Bass,” Jax says, proud. “Motion sensor. It sings when you walk past. That’s security and entertainment.”