I shudder. “No, please not a turtle. I hate turtles.”

“I don’t want a dog or a turtle,” Nico says. “I want a praying mantis.”

I nearly choke on a broccoli floret. “A what?”

“Is actually a good pet,” Enzo chimes in. “Very easy to take care of.”

Oh my God, Enzo knows that Nico wants to bring this horrible thing into our house? “No. We are not getting a praying mantis.”

“But why not, Mom?” Nico presses me. “They are super cool. I’ll keep it in my room, and you don’t ever have to see it. Unless you want to see it.”

He flashes me that endearing smile of his. Right now, he has this adorable round face and a gap in his teeth. But you can just tell that in another six or seven years, he’s going to be breaking hearts like his father used to before we were together.

“I don’t care if I see it,” I say. “I’ll know it’s there.”

“We will keep it contained,” Enzo tells me, flashing his own version of that same smile. Damn my husband for being so handsome.

“What do you feed it?” I ask.

“Flies,” Nico says.

“No.” I shake my head. “No. We are not doing this.”

“Don’t worry,” Nico says. “They’re flightless flies.”

“They are walks,” Enzo jokes.

“It won’t even cost you anything,” Nico adds. “We’re going to grow the flies ourselves.”

“No. No, no, no.”

Enzo reaches under the table and gives my knee a squeeze. “Millie, we pulled the kids out of school and made them move here. If Nico wants a praying mantis…”

Bullshit. He wants the praying mantis too. It’s just the type of thing that Enzo would think is cool.

I look over at Ada for help, but she’s too absorbed in making little piles of noodles on her plate. She is spelling out her name in noodles. She doesn’t generally play with her food, so she must be really anxious.

“If I were to say yes,” I say, “where would we purchase a praying mantis?”

Enzo and Nico high-five each other, which would be adorable if I wasn’t so terrified of this insect they are bringing into the house.

“We can buy a praying mantis egg,” Nico explains. God, how long have they been discussing this? It seems like they have a very firm plan in mind. “And then it hatches and there are hundreds of them.”

“Hundreds…”

“But is okay,” Enzo says quickly. “They all eat each other, so then usually there’s only one or two left.”

“And then we can christen them,” Nico adds. “Okay, Mom?”

I imagine how horrified Suzette Lowell would be to discover there is a praying mantis as well as a colony of flightless flies in her perfect cul-de-sac, which is the only thing amusing about this situation. Okay, fine, I guess I’m going to let this happen. But I swear to God, if there are flies all over my beautiful new home, Nico is going to have to move out.

FOUR

If I unpack one more box, I am going to throw up.

I have unpacked five billion boxes today. That’s a conservative estimate. And now I am standing in the master bathroom, staring down at a cardboard box on which I wrote “BATHROOM” in permanent magic marker, and I just don’t have the will to open it. Even though it has crucial bathroom stuff inside it. Maybe I can brush my teeth with my finger tonight.

The sound of footsteps grows louder outside the door, and a second later, Enzo pops his head into the bathroom. He smiles when he sees me standing there with my BATHROOM box.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

My shoulders sag. “Unpacking.”

“You unpack all night,” he points out. “Enough. We do it tomorrow.”

“But we need this stuff. It’s for the bathroom.”

Enzo looks like he’s going to try to talk me out of it, but then he thinks better of it. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his worn blue jeans and pulls out the pocketknife he always carries around. His father gave him that knife when he was a boy, and it is engraved with his initials: EA. The knife is nearly forty years old, but he keeps it razor-sharp, so it cuts easily through the tape holding the box of bathroom supplies together.

Together, we unload the bathroom supplies. When I first met this man who made me weak at the knees, I never imagined a future in which we would be standing together in a bathroom, picking through bars of soap and sticky shampoo bottles. But strangely enough, Enzo has happily taken to domestic life.

We had been living together for less than a year when, in spite of diligent birth control use, I missed my period. I was terrified of telling him, but he was over the moon excited. Now we get to be a family! he said. His parents and sister were all dead, and I never realized how important it was to him to start a family of his own. We got married a month later.

And now, over a decade later, I am living the sort of domestic suburban life that I never dreamed of for myself. Not with Enzo—not with anyone. A lot of people would call it boring, but I love it. All I ever wanted was a normal, quiet sort of existence. It just took me longer than most people to get it.

Enzo removes his razors from the box, and now it’s finally empty. We are finished. Okay, we have another five billion boxes left in the house, but at least one more has been emptied so now it’s five billion minus one. I expect we will finish unpacking sometime in the next three or four decades.

“Okay,” Enzo says. “Now we are done for the day.”

“Yes,” I agree.

He glances over his shoulder at the queen-size bed with a fresh sheet spread across it, then he looks back at me with a grin on his face.

“What?” I tease him. “Do you want to christen the bed?”

“No,” he says, “I want to defile it.”

I let out a laugh, which gets cut off when he grabs me and heaves me up into his arms, carrying me across the threshold to our bed in our beautiful new master bedroom. I would tell him to be careful about his back, but considering he lifted boxes that weigh twice as much as I do (I hope), I’m assuming he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t stop until we reach the bed and he deposits me onto the sheets.

Enzo rips off his T-shirt and climbs on top of me, kissing my neck, but as much as I want to be into this, my eyes get drawn to the two picture windows right next to our bed. Why didn’t we get blinds? What kind of idiot moves into a house without making sure the windows are covered?

From my position on the bed, I have a great view of the house across the way. The windows are dark, yet I detect a flash of movement in one of the upstairs rooms. At least I think I do.

Enzo notices I’ve gone stiff and pulls away. “What is wrong?”

“The windows,” I murmur. “You can see everything.”

He raises his head, peering through our own window to 13 Locust Street. “The lights are out. They are asleep.”