The first thing she noticed missing was the coffee maker, on the fourth morning, because by then I was already three states away. What she did not know, what neither of them knew, was that the deed had never left my name.
Dashiell had asked me two years earlier to transfer it to him for the taxes, and I had said I would, and I never had, because something in me had waited even when I did not know what it was waiting for. The house was mine. It had always been mine. The tenant was a fiction Marisol invented and I let her keep it for exactly as long as it took me to pack.
