I moved the framed photo she had left behind onto the dresser where she had kept it, because it did not belong to me and I was going to return it to her, and in the meantime it belonged on the dresser.
Then I sat on the edge of the guest room bed and was very quiet for about five minutes.
The house felt like mine again. This sounds dramatic in a way it did not feel. It was not dramatic. It was quiet and ordinary and I was sitting on a bed in a room that was a guest room again instead of someone else’s room, in a house that was mine and Daniel’s again instead of a household Patricia was temporarily running.
I texted Lena: she moved out yesterday. House is mine again.
Lena wrote back: finally. How do you feel?
I wrote: mostly okay. A little sad in a way I didn’t expect.
She wrote: that makes sense.
It did make sense. The sadness was not about Patricia leaving, exactly, or not only about that. It was about the months that had passed in a way that had required so much managing, and about the distance between what I had expected the situation to be and what it had become, and about the fact that an arrangement that was supposed to be four weeks had taken four months to close.
It was also, a smaller part, about feeling slightly sorry for Patricia — not in a way that revised anything, but in the way of being human. She had wanted to be central and useful and close to her son and she had overdone it in ways that had real costs, and she was now in an apartment that was adequate and hers, and being adequate and hers is not the same as what she had hoped this period of her life would look like.