The text arrived at 2:13 in the morning.
Then I made the call I’d been thinking about for three days.
The home mover’s name was Roy. He ran a small operation — just him and a crew of four — and he specialized in lifting structures off their foundations and relocating them. He showed up on a Wednesday morning in a truck that looked like it had seen everything twice, walked the perimeter of the house with his hands in his pockets, knocked on walls, checked the crawl space, measured the roofline.
“Foundation’s concrete block,” he said, crouching down with a flashlight. “That’s actually easier. You want the lot completely cleared?”
“I want it to look like nothing was ever there,” I said.
He stood up and looked at me. Not with judgment. Just evaluation. “We can do that.”
We arranged the date. I arranged movers for the furniture and boxes I’d been quietly packing for a week. I called my college roommate, Dana, who lived forty minutes away and had a guest room and a dog named Biscuit and absolutely no patience for men like Ethan. She said “get here as fast as you can” without asking a single question.
The week Ethan got married on a beach somewhere with turquoise water, I packed my life into a moving truck. I took everything that was mine and some things that were ours and nothing that was his. I took my daughter’s painted coffee mug. I took the framed photo from our first apartment, the one where we’re both laughing and slightly blurry, taken by a stranger on the street who didn’t quite understand cameras. I don’t know why I took that one. Maybe because I wanted proof that there was a before. That it hadn’t all been a lie from the beginning.
Part 3
