We bought a two-bedroom in a decent building in Richfield in 2020, which we could just about carry between two incomes, and which was mine as much as his — I put in forty percent of the down payment and I have the wire to prove it, which mattered enormously later.

Daisy was born in 2021.

And in the spring of 2022, Beatrice and Raymond moved in.

The reason was real.

Raymond had been let go at fifty-eight from a job he had held for nineteen years, and their rent had gone up, and there was six months of nothing, and Mitchell came to me in the kitchen with an expression I had never seen on him and asked whether we could take his parents for a while.

I said yes.