They stared like I’d proposed living with a ghost. Derek’s first question was pure logistics—where would the money come from, what if tenants wrecked the place, what if interest rates jumped. Amber’s was softer and sharper at once: what would it mean for us if the house stopped being neutral ground and became mine, if holidays required my permission instead of a shared key under the frog statue. I answered with the math first—appraisals, refinancing, a payment I could barely carry if nothing went wrong—then with what refused to fit any cell on the spreadsheet. The workshop still smelled like sawdust and burned coffee. His handwriting still labeled every drawer. Selling now felt like erasing a sentence mid-word, like admitting the last time I slammed the red door behind me really had been the last.

They said yes in different ways. Derek signed quickly, eyes on the check, guilt and relief wrestling across his jaw. Amber lingered over each page, finally trading her share of equity for his reading glasses, a photo from the mantle, and my promise that the red door would always open for her. The papers were done by January. In April, I made his chili from a stained index card annotated with “enough” and “a good bit,” serving bowls to Derek at the same table where we’d negotiated our grief. By June, I’d changed the flickering bulb over the workbench and sat in his old camp chair, the house no longer a shrine or a flip, but something harder and better: a place that could hold two truths at once—that he was gone, irretrievably, and that life here, with the rooster tiles and the creek and the maple tree, was still, stubbornly, going on.