Sadie walked slowly from room to room, touching each wall with her fingertips as if to test whether it was real.

“Can we stay here?” she asked. “Without anybody making us leave?”

I crouched down to her level, even though the question hurt to hear.

“This lease has my name on it,” I said. “Nobody can put us out because a cup didn’t get washed, or because we got inconvenient. This is ours. We stay.”

We ate pizza off paper plates that first night, because our furniture was two sleeping bags, an air mattress, and four folding chairs borrowed from a coworker.

Before bed, Sadie taped a crayon drawing beside the light switch — the five of us, or the four of us and a large yellow sun, all of us holding hands under it.