Moving day was the first time I let myself feel how far we’d come, because you can’t feel it while you’re still climbing.

I stood in the empty new kitchen with a coffee, listening to the children stake their claims down the hall — Maisie announcing which room was hers in a tone that permitted no appeal, Caleb testing the echo of a room with nothing in it yet, Sadie quiet, walking the space, touching the walls the way she’d touched the walls of the first apartment, checking whether it was real.

Eighteen months earlier I had counted singles onto a motel counter. Now I was holding a lease with three bedrooms on it, signed in my own name, paid for with money I had earned.

Nobody had given it to me. Nobody could take it back. I drank my coffee and let myself cry a little, in the good way, alone in a kitchen that was ours.

Chapter 10 — Brooke’s Coffee

Stability, it turned out, was a magnet for exactly the people who had been missing during every hard part of building it.

Brooke turned up outside the hospital one afternoon holding two coffees and an expression she had clearly prepared in advance for reconciliation.