She paid the mortgage off before we were even married — she owned it outright, in her own name, the whole time — and now she’s sold it for five million dollars and there is nothing, nothing, that any of us can do about it!”

I was not there to see it.

I heard the shape of it later, from the divorce proceedings and from a cousin of Luca’s who found the whole thing darkly funny.

But I have imagined it many times: the exact moment three people who had spent years certain the ground was theirs felt it open beneath all of them at once.

They had built their entire sense of themselves on a foundation they did not own and had never paid for.