The house sold in August. It was not how either of us had imagined leaving it, but the appraisal made the decision clearer than months of arguments could have done. Sabrina could have kept it only by taking on a mortgage that would have left her with almost no margin for the unexpected, and I could have kept it only by tying up money the business needed for its employees. We agreed on a sale price after one round of negotiations and divided the proceeds according to the settlement Rebecca and Sabrina's attorney prepared.
On the day the buyers came for their final inspection, I was in the garage sorting tools into boxes. Sabrina arrived to remove the last things from the upstairs closet and found me sitting on an overturned bucket with an old brass doorknob in my hand. It had been the first thing we'd replaced when we moved in, and I'd kept it because the scratch across its face had always amused me. She stood in the doorway for a moment, then sat on a stack of moving blankets opposite me.
"Remember the first winter?" she asked. "The furnace broke during that cold snap, and we slept on the living room floor because the fireplace was the only warm room."
"You accused me of buying the house for its charm instead of its plumbing."
"I was right." She smiled. "About the plumbing, anyway."
I smiled back. There was no reason to erase the memory simply because the ending had hurt. We sat in silence for a while, listening to footsteps upstairs as the inspector moved through the rooms. Then Sabrina asked whether she could take the pencil height marks we'd made for Tessa's children by photographing the doorway.
"Of course," I said. "I'll send Tessa the pictures, too."
Sabrina looked down at her hands. "I did love living here with you. I know that may not mean much now."
"It means something. It just doesn't change what we're doing."
She nodded. For a moment she seemed about to say she wished I could see how hard she had been trying to become someone different. Instead she told me that the firm's internal review had ended. Colin's employment had been terminated after the company determined he'd approved personal expenses through client-development accounts and failed to disclose a relationship that affected his supervision of staff. Sabrina had received a disciplinary finding and resigned rather than return to the same team after being removed from leadership responsibilities.
"I'm not telling you because I want sympathy," she said. "I just don't want you to hear it from somebody else."
I appreciated that. She was doing what she'd once refused to do: allowing me to hear an uncomfortable fact directly instead of arranging the story around my reaction. I told her I was sorry she'd lost work she once loved, then asked whether she had a plan. She said she was doing contract communications projects while she decided what kind of job she wanted next.