I closed the door. I didn’t slam it. I closed it the exact same way I had closed every door in that house for eighteen years running, gently, using both hands out of some old habit I couldn’t name. Then I leaned back against the wood and simply breathed for a while.
The hallway looked precisely the same as it always had. The photographs on the wall looked the same too. Tyler and me at our wedding, both of us absurdly young. The kids at their respective graduations, gowns too big in the shoulders. A vacation photo from Maine that I now realized, looking at it properly for the first time in years, my husband hadn’t actually seemed fully present for even then. My eyes drifted toward the office doorway at the end of the hall.
On the wall inside, in a simple black frame, hung a copy of the deed to this house. My own father had insisted I frame it years earlier, back when I thought the gesture was mostly sentimental.
