Tonight, somewhere, a woman I have never met is deciding whether to sell me her mother’s house.
She is the executor of her mother’s estate, and according to their realtor, the family is having a hard time letting the house go.
I understand that. What feels strange is that while they are trying to figure out how to let it stop being their mother’s house, I am sitting here desperately hoping they will let it become mine.
My phone is next to me. I keep looking at it. Every time it lights up, my stomach drops. Every time it doesn’t, I look anyway.
I know there is nothing I can do tonight. The offer has been made. The contract is in their hands. My realtor has talked to their realtor. The questions have been asked. The explanations have been given. Now there is only waiting, and I have never been particularly good at waiting when the thing on the other side matters this much.
I have spent the last month looking at houses, studying listings, calculating taxes, driving through towns I barely knew, walking through bedrooms and kitchens and basements and trying to imagine whether any of them could hold our life. Some houses were easy to leave. Some I liked enough to picture furniture in. Some I wanted badly enough to make an offer.
I have done this part before.
Twice, actually.
The first house I offered on was one we genuinely loved. I could picture us there. I let myself hope. Then I lost it.
The second one I placed an offer on was stranger. We did not love it when we first walked through. But after losing the first house, I started trying to picture us there anyway. I rearranged it in my head. I imagined how we would use the rooms. Somewhere in that imagining, I changed my own mind and began to want it.
Then we waited thirty-six hours while the seller went back and forth with us, and somewhere during all that waiting I realized how badly I had started to want that house too. We lost that one, too.
I was anxious both times. I watched my phone both times. I wanted both houses.
But I did not cry.
This one was different. I knew it almost immediately.
We had barely stepped into the first room, the kitchen, when I felt it.
Not eventually. Not after I had gone home and mentally arranged the furniture. Not after I had talked myself into the possibilities.
Immediately.
This is supposed to be ours.
And almost as quickly, another thought:
What’s meant to be ours won’t pass us by.
I do not know where that certainty came from. I only know that I felt it.
Not because it was perfect. It wasn’t. There were things I would change. Rooms I would rearrange. Projects I could already see myself doing.
But when we walked through the house, something in me settled.
This is it.
I could see us there. Not in some Pinterest-board version of our lives. In the ordinary version. Shoes by the door. Backpacks dropped somewhere they shouldn’t be. Dinner in the dining room. Laundry upstairs. Kids disappearing into their rooms. Me sitting in the living room at night after everything finally got quiet.
I have already arranged the furniture in my head. I have pictured the boys running up the stairs. I have imagined us standing in front of the house for the picture you take when the sign finally says sold.
Our little family.
Just us three.
Our stuff in those rooms. Our cars in that driveway. Our life inside those walls.
Home.
That is why this waiting feels different.
I liked the other houses. I could picture us in them. I was disappointed when we lost them.
This one has already made me teary-eyed before I even know the answer.
Because I am not trying to imagine whether we could belong there.
Some part of me already believes we do.
And now I am terrified.
Because hope is easy when it is vague. Someday I will buy a house. Someday we will have our own place again. Someday something will work out.
There is safety in someday.
Tonight, someday has an address.
And suddenly hope feels dangerous.
I keep thinking, I need this.
I know, technically, that I don’t. I will survive if the answer is no. I have survived worse things than losing a house.
But after years of rebuilding, of starting over and figuring things out and trying again, I want something I reach for to finally reach back.
I want to hear that I got it. I want to tell the boys. I want to walk through that front door again knowing I am not just visiting. I want the next chapter to start there.
Maybe that is too much to put on a house. Maybe tomorrow I will know that.
But tonight I don’t.
Tonight I feel it in my bones.
This is supposed to be our home.
And somewhere, a woman is holding the contract that could make it so.
So I wait. I watch my phone. I will it to light up. And I sit here in the strange, unbearable space between the life I have now and the life I might wake up to tomorrow.
Nothing has changed yet.
But everything could.
Update:
I wrote this the night of August 27th, while I was waiting to find out whether the offer would be accepted.
The next afternoon, I got the answer.
They said yes.
The house I was so scared to lose is going to be ours.
We’re going home.
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