neighborhoods, scouting for a moving truck or an estate-sale sign, any hint
at all that might give you the jump on a place before it officially comes up
for sale. You know the odds aren’t in your favor—and yet it has to happen
for someone, right?
Right?
“You’re sure it’s in Grovemont?” I ask Ginny, my voice a stage whisper
like I’m afraid the secret will get out. Someone lays on their horn three
stories below, a well-timed reminder of why I hate this place so much.
“Sure is, kiddo,” she says. “My sister-in-law’s been inside. She says it’s
stunning. I’m in the car, but I’m gonna have Travis send you the address so
you and Ian can go have a look from the street. Let me know what you
think as soon as you can.”
Even before the email from Ginny’s assistant lands in my inbox, I feel
the thing that I promised myself I would stop feeling: a hunch that this
house could be The One. Why else would my real estate agent—of all the
rabid, razor-elbowed agents in Washington—have been the one to score
such an extraordinary piece of intel? Or maybe it’s that I have to believe it’s
the one. Like a self-preservation thing. Because otherwise, I am terrified
that we have really, truly, finally run out of options.
Ian and I have been stuck here—in an apartment so small you can
vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet—for eighteen increasingly
hellish months. The first six or seven of those drifted by in a kind of placid
denial. We still fucked like it would be ideal if I got pregnant immediately,
like obviously we’d be out of here and settled into the new house whenever
the baby arrived. This was always part of the plan, after all, when we
decided to sell our starter home. We had to get the money out of it if we
were ever going to afford the dream house in the burbs, so it was
unavoidable that we’d have to spend a little while renting.
And it’s not like we went in totally blind. We sold the last place—a
falling-apart row house almost far west enough to count as Logan Circle—
in the fall of 2020, the point in the pandemic when everyone realized that if
Covid didn’t suffocate them, spending another minute within the same four
walls probably would. DC, like everywhere else, was already in the middle
of a housing shortage and now hordes of buyers desperate for more space
