The house on the quiet end of our street in New York still smelled like our mother's kitchen even four years after she'd died, and Mara had the valuation printed and waiting on the table when I walked in that evening, the way she waited for everything now — with lists.
"Independent appraiser," she said, sliding the paper toward me before I'd even taken off my coat. "Not a friend of yours, not someone from Bellweather. Four hundred and ten thousand, as-is."
I looked at the number, did the math I'd already done a dozen times in my head. Half of that was more than I had, considerably more than I had, unless the promotion came through the way Grant had implied it would, with its raise and its bonus structure that made the whole plan feel, for a while, inevitable.
"I need an answer by December," Mara said. "Buy out my half or we list it. I can't keep paying a mortgage on a house I'm not living in while you figure out your timeline, Celia."
She took a second page from beneath the valuation. It listed the payments we each made and the repairs we had deferred, including the back step I had stopped noticing because I knew where not to put my foot. Her own rent appeared near the bottom. I had never seen the two households laid out together.
"You don't have to defend every expense," I said.
"I'm not defending them. I'm showing you why waiting isn't free." She turned the page so I could read it without craning my neck. "I can manage this for a while. I can't make it my permanent arrangement."
I found a pencil in the drawer and wrote my current income in the margin. Then I added what I thought the promotion would bring. Mara put her finger between the two figures.
"Which one could you take to a lender tomorrow?"
I crossed out the second figure, more heavily than necessary. She didn't look satisfied. She looked tired, which was harder to resent. I asked her to leave both pages with me, and she agreed, provided leaving the papers didn't mean leaving the decision with her as well.
"December," I said again. This time I wrote it across the top. It was the first mark on the page that belonged to both of us.
"December's reasonable," I said, because it was, because she had waited two years already while I talked about advancement like it was a sure thing instead of a conversation Grant and I had had once, in passing, that I had since built an entire future around.
"Is it still happening?" Mara asked. "The promotion. You've gone quiet about it."
"It's happening," I said, and heard the thinness in my own voice even as I said it. "There's a process. Reviews. Nothing's final until it's final, that's all."
Mara studied me the way she used to when we were girls and she knew I was shading the truth toward whatever was easiest to hear. "You'd tell me if it wasn't happening."
"Of course I would." I folded the valuation in half, as if that made the number smaller. "I'm not going to let you down on this, Mara. I know what this house is supposed to buy you."
She softened then, briefly, reaching over to squeeze my hand the way she had at our mother's funeral, a gesture that asked for nothing and forgave everything. "I'm not trying to push you out. I just need it to be real, not just a nice idea we're both living inside."
After she left for her own apartment that night, I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and wrote an email to Grant before I could talk myself out of it — a simple request, nothing dramatic, asking him to put the promotion terms in writing so I'd have something firmer than a hallway conversation to plan a life around.
I sent it before I could reread it, and sat for a long moment afterward in the kitchen that still smelled faintly of a woman who'd never had to ask anyone to make a promise solid, and felt, for the first time since Nolan's thin folder, the particular cold of a deadline that didn't care how confident I sounded.