“Colin?” she said softly.
She said his name like she expected him to fix me.
“Let’s talk later,” he told her.
“No,” I interrupted. “You can talk later about where else she’s going to live. I don’t want her leaving here thinking this is still negotiable.”
Vanessa gathered her samples and left.
Colin followed her outside.
When her car finally pulled away, I picked up the curtain rod, opened the hardware package, and realized I had bought the wrong brackets.
I sat down on the guest-house floor and laughed once.
It sounded almost like crying.
I was thirty-eight and worked as a speech-language pathologist at a public elementary school.
Six years earlier, I had bought my property with a down payment that had consumed most of the savings I built during my twenties.
The detached guest house had always been a rental unit, but it needed significant repairs. The plumbing was old. The bathroom floor needed replacement. Paint was peeling. Fixtures were outdated.
