The first thing I heard when I stepped onto my own front porch was the sound of something being torn apart. Not a loud crash. Not a single accident.
A steady, deliberate scraping. Metal against wood. Then a thud.
Then another. I stood there with my suitcase handle still warm in my palm, my travel purse sliding off one shoulder, and listened for a few seconds longer than any homeowner should have to listen outside her own front door. I had been gone for two weeks.
Two quiet weeks on the coast with my sister, drinking too much coffee, walking along the water before breakfast, pretending that salt air could loosen the knots I had carried in my chest all year. Before I left, my house had been clean. Not fancy.
Not new. But mine. The living room still had the soft green walls I had painted after my husband died.
The kitchen cabinets were the same ones he and I had argued over in a hardware store thirty years ago. My bedroom had a quilt folded across the foot of the bed, a white dresser, and the framed watercolor my son had made for me in third grade, back when he still signed his name in uneven block letters. I had not left a contractor working inside.
I had not ordered repairs. I had not given anyone permission to touch a doorknob, much less remove a wall fixture. Still, the sound kept going.
Scrape. Thud. Scrape.
I unlocked the front door slowly. The moment I opened it, the smell hit me first. Fresh paint.
Drywall dust. Something sharp and chemical beneath it, like primer and entitlement. The living room was half-covered in plastic sheeting.
My sofa had been shoved into the center of the room with the lamps piled on top of it. One wall had been painted halfway in a pale gray that looked cold against the warmer color underneath. The edges were uneven, as if whoever started the job assumed finishing mattered more than asking.
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