“Just the babysitter.”
I sat with it. Then I decided what to do about it.
## The Original Plan
The Friday in January when Owen texted me, I was finishing up payroll reconciliation for the quarter, which is the kind of work that requires a second cup of coffee and the willingness to find one transposed digit across four hundred lines of data. It was not the moment I was hoping for an unexpected ask.
The text said: *Housing thing got complicated. Is there any chance the kids could stay with you this weekend? Just Friday night through Sunday. Brooke is handling the move and they don’t need to be in the middle of it.*
I called him instead of texting back because I wanted to hear how he said it, not just what he said. He sounded tired and a little embarrassed, the way Owen sounds when he knows he’s asking for something he should have arranged better. The situation, as he explained it, was that he and Brooke were separating — I’d known this was coming, the marriage had been rocky for over a year — and Brooke was moving into a temporary place while she took a long-term temporary assignment with a distribution company two hours south. Owen was in between leases; his current landlord hadn’t renewed, and the new place wouldn’t be ready until the middle of the following week at the earliest.
Max and Ella needed to be somewhere stable for the weekend. My place was the obvious answer.