PARTI

ONE

MILLIE

Three Months Earlier

I love this house.
I love everything about this house. I love the giant front lawn
and the even more giant back lawn (even though both are edging
toward brown). I love the fact that the living room is so big that
multiple pieces of furniture fit inside rather than just one small sofa
and a television set. I love the picture windows overlooking the
neighborhood, which I recently read in a magazine is one of the best
towns to raise a child.
And most of all, I love that it’s mine. Number 14 Locust Street is
all mine. Well, okay, thirty years of mortgage payments and it will be
all mine. I can’t stop thinking about how lucky I am as I run my
fingers along the wall of our new living room, bringing my face
closer to admire the brand-new floral wallpaper.
“Mom is kissing the house again!” a voice squeals from behind
me.
I quickly back away from the wall, although it’s not like my nine
year-old son caught me with a secret lover. I have no shame about
my love for this house. I want to shout about it from the rooftop.
(We have an amazing rooftop. I love this house.)
“Shouldn’t you be unpacking?” I say.
Nico’s boxes and furniture have all been deposited in his
bedroom, so he should be unpacking, but instead he is repeatedly
throwing a baseball against the wall—my beautiful, floral
wallpapered wall—and then catching it. We have lived in this house
for less than five minutes, and he is already determined to destroy
it. I can see it in his dark brown eyes.
It’s not that I don’t love my son more than the world. If it was
one of those hypothetical situations where I had to choose between
Nico’s life and this house, of course I would choose Nico. No
question.
But I’m just saying, if he does anything to harm this house, he is
going to be grounded until he’s old enough to shave.
“I’ll unpack tomorrow,” Nico says. His general life philosophy
seems to be that everything will be done tomorrow.
“Or now?” I suggest.
Nico throws the ball in the air, and it just barely grazes the
ceiling. If we had absolutely anything valuable in this house, I would
be having a heart attack right now. “Later,” he insists.
Meaning never.
I peer up the stairwell of the house. Yes, we have stairs! Honest
to-goodness stairs. Yes, they creak with every single step, and
there’s a chance if you hold on to the banister too tightly, it might
fall off. But we have stairs, and they lead to an entirely different
floor of the house.
You can tell I have lived in New York City far too long. I was
hesitant to come back to Long Island after what happened last time
I lived here, but that was nearly two decades ago—the distant past.
“Ada?” I call up the stairs. “Ada, can you come out here?”
A few moments later, my eleven-year-old daughter pops her head
into the stairwell so that I can see her thick, wavy black hair and
dark, dark eyes peeking out at me. Her eyes are the same color as
Nico’s, inherited from their father. Unlike her brother, Ada has
undoubtedly been unpacking her belongings since we arrived. She’s
a straight-A student—the kind who does her homework without
having to be told, a week before it’s due.
“Ada,” I say. “Are you almost done unpacking?”
“Just about.” No surprise there.
“Do you think you could help Nico unpack his boxes?”
Ada nods without hesitation. “Sure. Come on, Nico.”
Nico immediately recognizes this as an opportunity for his sister
to do most of the work. “Okay!” he agrees happily.
Nico finally stops terrorizing me with the baseball and sprints up
the steps two at a time to join Ada in his room. I start to tell her not
to do all the work for him, but that’s a lost cause. At this point, I’ve
got about sixty boxes of my own to unpack. As long as it gets done,
I’ll be happy.
We were extremely lucky to get this house. We lost half a dozen
bidding wars in neighborhoods that weren’t even as nice as this one.
I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell of landing this
quaint former farmhouse in a town with such highly rated public
schools. I almost cried with joy when our real estate agent called me
to let me know that the house was ours. At ten percent less than
asking!
The universe must have decided we deserved some good luck.
I peek out through the front window at the moving truck parked
on the street outside the house. We live in a little cul-de-sac with
two other houses, and across the way, I can see the silhouette of a
person at the window. My new neighbor, I suppose. I hope they’re
friendly.
A banging sound comes from within the truck, and I wrench
open the front door to see what’s going on. I jog outside just in time
to see my husband emerging from the truck with one of his friends
who has agreed to help with the move. I wanted to hire a moving
company, but he insisted he could do it himself with his friends
helping. And I have to admit, we need to save every penny if we
want to make our mortgage payments. Even at ten percent below
asking, our dream house wasn’t cheap.
My husband is holding up one half of our living room sofa, his T
shirt plastered to his torso with sweat. I cringe because he’s in his
forties and the last thing he needs is to throw out his back. I
expressed this concern to him when we were planning the move,
and he acted like it was the silliest thing he’s ever heard, even
though I throw out my back every other week. And it’s not from
lifting a sofa. It’s from, like, sneezing.
“Will you please be careful, Enzo?” I say.
He looks up at me, and when he grins, I melt. Is that normal? Do
other women who are married to somebody for over eleven years
still get wobbly in the knees over them sometimes?
No? Just me?
I mean, it’s not like it’s every minute. But boy, he still gets me. It
doesn’t hurt that he seems to get inexplicably sexier every year.
(And I just get a year older.)
“I am careful,” he insists. “Besides, this couch? Is light! Weighs
almost nothing.”
That warrants an eye roll from the guy holding the other end of
the couch. But admittedly, it’s not exactly a heavy-duty couch. We
got it from IKEA, which is a step up from the last couch, which we
grabbed from the curb. Enzo used to have this theory that all the
best furniture came from the curb outside our apartment.
We’ve grown up a little since then. I hope.
As Enzo and his friend bring the sofa into our beautiful new
house, I raise my eyes again to look at the house across the way.
Number 13 Locust Street. There’s still someone staring at me from
the window. The house is dark inside, so I can’t see much, but that
silhouette is still at the window.
Somebody is watching us.
But there’s nothing ominous about that. The people in that house
are our new neighbors, and I’m sure they are curious about who we
are. Whenever I used to see a moving truck outside our building, I
always watched through the window to see who was moving in, and
Enzo would laugh and tell me to stop watching and go introduce
myself.
That’s the difference between him and me.
Well, it’s not the only difference.
In an effort to change my ways and be more friendly like my
husband, I lift a hand to wave at the silhouette. May as well meet
my new neighbor at 13 Locust.
Except the person at the window doesn’t wave back. Instead, the
shutters suddenly snap closed and the silhouette disappears.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
TWO
Enzo is carrying the last of the boxes into the house while I’m
standing out on our sparse lawn, avoiding unpacking while
fantasizing about how the lawn will look after my husband
rejuvenates it. Enzo is a wizard when it comes to lawns—that’s sort
of how we first met. This one almost looks like a lost cause with its
brown patches and crumbly soil, but I know that a year from now,
we will have the nicest lawn in the cul-de-sac.
I am lost in my fantasies when the door of the house directly
next to ours—12 Locust Street—swings open. A woman with a
butterscotch-colored layered bob emerges from the house wearing a
fitted white blouse and red skirt with spiky high heels that look like
they could be used to gouge out somebody’s eye. (Why does my
mind always go there?)
Unlike the neighbor across the way, she seems friendly. She
raises her hand in an enthusiastic greeting and crosses the short
path of cobbled pavement separating our houses.
“Hello!” she gushes. “It is so good to finally meet our new
neighbors! I’m Suzette Lowell.”
As I reach out and take her manicured hand in mine, I’m
rewarded with an impressively painful handshake for a woman.
“Millie Accardi,” I say.
“Lovely to meet you, Millie,” she says. “You’re going to absolutely
adore living here.”
“I already do,” I say honestly. “This house is amazing.”
“Oh, it really is.” Suzette bobs her head. “It was lying empty for a
while because, you know, such a small house is a hard sell. But I
just knew the right family would come along.”
Small? Is she insulting our beloved house? “Well, I love it.”
“Oh yes. It’s so cozy, isn’t it? And…” Her gaze rakes over our
front steps, which have slightly crumbled, although Enzo swears he’ll
fix them. It’s one of a long list of repairs we’ll need to make. “Rustic.
So rustic.”
Okay, she’s definitely insulting the house.
But I don’t care. I still love the house. It doesn’t matter to me
what some snooty neighbor thinks.
“So do you work, Millie?” Suzette asks, her blue-green eyes
zeroing in on my face.
“I’m a social worker,” I say with a touch of pride. Even though I
have been doing it for many years now, I still feel proud of my
career. Yes, it can be exhausting, soul wrenching, and the pay is
nothing to get excited about. But I still love it. “How about you?”
“I’m a real estate agent,” she says with an equal amount of
pride. Ah, that explains the way she was insulting our house in real
estate speak. “The market is jumping right now.”
Well, that’s true. It occurs to me now that Suzette was not
involved in the sale of this house. If she’s a real estate agent, how
come her neighbors didn’t want her to sell their house?
Enzo emerges from the truck, carrying more boxes, his T-shirt
still clinging to his chest and his black hair damp. I remember filling
one of those boxes with books and being worried that I had made it
too heavy. And now he’s carrying not only that box, but he’s put
another one on top of it. My back aches just watching him.
Suzette is watching him too. She follows his progress from the
moving truck to our front door, a smile spreading across her lips.
“Your moving guy is really hot,” she comments.
“Actually,” I say, “that’s my husband.”
Her jaw drops open. Looks like she thinks more of him than she
does of the house. “Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.” Enzo has deposited the boxes in the living room, and
he is coming out of the house for more. How does he have the
energy? Before he reaches the truck, I wave him over. “Enzo, come
meet our new neighbor, Suzette.”
Suzette quickly tugs at her blouse and tucks a strand of
butterscotch hair behind her ear. If she could, I’m pretty sure she
would have given herself a quick once-over in a compact mirror and
refreshed her lipstick. But there’s no time for that.
“Hello!” she gushes with an outstretched hand. “It’s so nice to
meet you! Enzo, is it?”
He takes her hand and flashes her a broad smile that makes the
lines around his eyes crinkle. “Yes, I am Enzo. And you are Suzette?”
She giggles and nods eagerly. Her reaction is a bit over the top,
but to be fair, he is turning up the charm. My husband has lived in
this country for twenty years, and when we talk at the dinner table,
his accent is relatively mild. But when he’s trying to be charming, he
turns up his accent so that he sounds like he’s right off the boat. Or
as he would say, “right off boat.”
“You are absolutely going to love it here,” Suzette assures us.
“It’s such a quiet little cul-de-sac.”
“We already love it,” I say.
“And your house is so cute,” she says, finding yet another
creative way to point out that our house is substantially smaller than
hers. “It will be perfect for you and your kids, especially with
another little one on the way.”
When she says that, she looks pointedly at my abdomen, which
definitely does not contain any little ones on the way. There have
not been any little ones in there for nine years.
The worst part is that Enzo swivels his head to look at me, and
for a second, there’s a glimmer of excitement on his face, even
though he knows very well that I had my tubes tied during my
emergency C-section with Nico. I look down at my belly, and I notice
that my shirt does bulge in an unfortunate way. I’m dying a little bit
inside.
“I’m not pregnant,” I say, for both the benefit of Suzette and
apparently also my husband.
Suzette clasps a hand over her red lipstick. “Oh dear, I am so
sorry! I just assumed…”
“It’s okay,” I say, cutting her off before she makes it worse.
Honestly, I love my body. When I was in my twenties, I was a stick
figure, but now I finally have some womanly curves to show off, and
I daresay my husband seems to enjoy them as well.
That said, I’m throwing away this shirt.
“We have two children.” Enzo flings an arm around my shoulders,
oblivious to Suzette’s insult. “Our son, Nico, and our daughter, Ada.”
Enzo couldn’t be more proud of our two children. He’s a great
father, and he would have wanted another five of them if I hadn’t
nearly died giving birth to our son. We would have loved to adopt or
do foster care, but with my background, it was out of the question.
“Do you have children, Suzette?” I ask