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free to continue living as an unfettered twelve-year-old with a ten-speed, no curfew, no dinner cooling on the kitchen counter, no one calling the hospitals when she didn’t make it home before dark. Even on their honeymoon in France, she’d spent the first day and a half teaching herself to drive stick because she refused to let Brian be the sole driver of the rental car. “I need to know I can get away,” she’d joked, and he’d laughed, and let her drive the whole time, translating signs for her, reading maps, pointing out Gothic architecture. It was almost impossible to get the cranky Peugeot into reverse, but eventually she succeeded. “ Now you can get away,” Brian had said with a slow smile as she backed out of the parking lot of the Château de Sully-sur-Loire. She’d always assumed it was his way of holding on to her, this insistence on letting go.
    And then her babies were born and pulled everything inside out. Instead of needing to know she could get away, Sophie needed very badly to know that she wouldn’t. But that’s what the house was for, wasn’t it? Putting down roots. Making promises she had no choice but to keep.
    She folded her butcher paper into a square and smoothed it flat. Their babysitting hours were slipping away, and her breasts were beginning to ache, but they sat a little longer, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. They watched the mailman shove piles of catalogs into slapping mail slots, and listened to the idling thrum of delivery trucks on the avenue. They waved to the old woman across the street who kept stealing peeks from behind a lace curtain. It was a rare moment unhooked from nap schedules and tantrum management; it could almost, Sophie reflected, be a moment lifted from their life before children. But this time she felt the weight of appreciation, and the creeping prickle of guilt.
    “Back to work,” she said, putting her hand on Brian’s shoulder and heaving herself to her feet.
    ***
    The block was lined with jack-o’-lanterns by the time Sophie and Brian finally brought the kids to see the house for the first time. It felt strange, after months of stepping over chunks of plaster and rusty nails, to carry their children across the threshold and set them down on the gleaming wood floor. Sunlight poured through the freshly cleaned front windows, illuminating the butter-yellow walls that were were, for a splendid moment, free of crayon marks, handprints, and fire-truck-shaped dents. The trim, stripped to its youthful profile and painted white, outlined each feature like glossy meringue icing, and the chestnut banister stretched upward through the house like a strand of pulled caramel. Elliot pointed at the living room’s new pendant lights, hooting appreciatively. Meanwhile, Lucy marched straight to the locked door of the powder room. “We don’t go in there, honey,” Sophie said. “It’s not finished yet.” They didn’t have enough money to renovate the small bathroom, and the floor was in danger of collapsing, so for now it was off-limits.
    They took the children to the second floor to see their bedrooms. Lucy stood uncertainly in the middle of her pale blue room, gazing up at the windows filled with sunny yellow leaves. She peeked into the shallow closet where people had once hung their clothes on hooks, and where, Sophie imagined, Lucy would someday hide her diary, or a Judy Blume book, or worse. Lucy looked up at her mother with a worried expression, and finally asked, hesitantly, if she was going to sleep on the floor. Sophie laughed and picked her up, carrying her around the room and helping her imagine her new big-girl bed against this wall, a wardrobe over here, a table and chair in this corner, some shelves. Later, posters and headphones and a mirror. Slumber parties and heartbreak, rock anthems and rage. A place where Lucy could be alone but not lonely. A place where, Sophie half hoped, a mother might be occasionally resented, but never longed