This was the thing, the thing he had been protecting himself from wanting because wanting it meant it could be taken away. He was going to want it anyway. I'll call a realtor Thursday. He said, "I know a good one." "Of course you do.
I'm working professional," Darius. He picked up his chopsticks. "Eat your food." She ate her food. The house they found was not immediate.
They looked at seven properties over 6 weeks, and three of them were immediately wrong for reasons both practical and instinctive, and two of them were fine in ways that felt exactly like settling. And one of them Clare loved and Darius could see why. But the garage was too small for what he needed, which he felt guilty about until she said, "The garage matters. We're not settling on the garage." And he thought again about the specific quality of a person who refuses to let you make yourself smaller, even for their benefit.
The seventh house was a two-story craftsman on a quiet street in a neighborhood that was neither of their current one, but was reasonable to both. Wide porch, three bedrooms, a room off the back that could be a studio, a detached garage that made Darius stop talking when he walked into it and just stand there for a moment running calculations. A yard that was real yard, not postage stamp with a fence that needed one section replaced, but was otherwise solid. They walked through it in 40 minutes. They talked about it on the porch afterward, leaning against the railing, talking through money and logistics and timing with the practical direct of two adults who had been careful about this for the right reasons.
Maya came with them to the second visit. She walked through every room with the forced attention of a person conducting an inspection. She checked the window in her potential bedroom, good light, she noted, which was apparently a criteria, and the distance from her room to the bathroom. And whether there was a place in the yard for the garden she had decided she wanted to start, which was new information to Darius, but which he absorbed without comment. At the end of the second visit, they stood on the porch together.
The three of them looking at the street, Maya said. This one, Darius looked at Clare. Clare looked at Darius. This one, Clare said. Darius looked at the house, at the porch, at the yard, at the garage.
He could already see organized exactly the way it needed to be organized at the room that would be Clare's studio and the bedroom that would be Maya's and the life that was waiting inside these walls for people who were ready to live it honestly. Yeah, he said this one. They made an offer on a Thursday. It was accepted on a Saturday morning and Darius was on a job when his realtor called and he sat in his van in a client's driveway and looked at his phone for 10 seconds and then called Clare and when she picked up he said, "We got it." And she said, "I know.
I just got off with the realtor and he said, "You talked to the realtor before I called you." And she said, "I was waiting for you to call. I wanted to hear you say it." He sat in his van and said, "We got it, Clare." She was quiet for a second.
Just a second. Yeah, she said. We did. The moving weekend arrived in late July and it was exactly as chaotic as two households becoming one household. Always is boxes stacked in wrong rooms.
Furniture that fit perfectly in one house refusing to cooperate in another. Marcus arriving 3 hours late with a truck he'd borrowed from someone and refusing to acknowledge that 3 hours was late. Maya providing running commentary on every organizational decision with the confidence of a child who has decided she is the project manager. And in the middle of it on the first afternoon, Clare walked into the living room carrying something Darius had not seen her bring in. A curtain rod still in the box.