I did not make him list everything then.
He would have to do that later if he wanted a relationship with me.
For now, I needed my house back.
We restored the bedroom slowly.
My reading chair had been pushed into the basement storage area beneath a sheet. One leg was scratched but intact. The wedding photographs were stacked in a guest-room closet. My clothes filled three plastic bins in the garage and another box under the smaller bed.
The vitamins were exactly where Melissa had placed them, lined neatly on the smaller nightstand as though neatness made the relocation legitimate.
I carried them back myself.
The rolling suitcase was behind the six storage boxes.
I laughed when I found it.
“They hid the thing I would have needed to move out,” I told Linda.
She laughed too, then unexpectedly began crying.
I sat beside her on the garage floor.
“I should’ve known,” she said.
“No.”
“Daniel called me. I thought the repair story was strange.”
“He counted on all of us treating strange things as not our business.”
That was the truth.
Entitlement grows well in polite silence.
The boxes taught me more.
At the bottom of the fourth box was a folder containing brochures for three senior apartment communities and two condominium buildings near Linda’s town. Melissa had circled prices and written notes about square footage.
The fifth box held a printed valuation of my house from a real estate website.
The sixth contained staging notes in Melissa’s handwriting.
Remove personal photos.
Clear bedroom.
Neutralize living room.
Declutter books.
I recognized the word declutter.
She had used it months earlier when she removed books from my living room because they looked messy in the background of her videos.
Now I understood she had not simply disliked my things.
She had begun mentally staging my home.
