I finally bought my dream house and invited my family to come see it. No one showed up. Later that night, my dad texted, “We need to talk about the house.” By then, something inside me had already shifted.

The key was cold in my palm, its edges sharp and new in the way of things that have not yet been worn smooth by use. I stood on the sidewalk for a long moment before I walked up to the door, because I had been imagining that exact moment for ten years and I wanted to give it its full weight before it became simply a thing that had happened and moved on into the past. The house was exactly the blue I had hoped for, a soft robin’s-egg color that seemed to hold light rather than merely reflect it. The fence was white. The oak tree in the front yard was as tall and broad as the one I had been drawing in notebooks since I was a child. The porch swing moved slightly in the afternoon breeze as if it had been waiting for me.