I bought a house in the spring of the third year.

Not a large one.

Three bedrooms, on a street with other houses on it, eleven minutes from Leo’s school, and it needed a roof within two years and I knew that when I bought it because I paid for the inspection and read all forty pages of it myself.

I bought it with the first tranche of the settlement money, in my own name, and I signed at a table with a closing attorney who talked the whole way through it, and at the end she pushed a two-page document across and said, “And that’s your settlement statement.”

I looked at it for a while.