Sloan took the master bathroom first. Not officially. Not with an announcement. She simply began leaving her things there — serums in glass bottles lined along my marble counter, a jade roller beside Walter's old shaving mug, a silk robe on the hook where my towel had hung for twenty years. When I mentioned it, lightly, over coffee, she laughed the laugh of a woman who finds boundaries adorable.
"Oh my God, Eleanor, there's plenty of space. We're family."
Harrison, pouring cereal into a bowl that had been my mother's, did not look up.
"Mom, it's temporary."
Temporary became the word that papered every crack. Temporary explained the takeover of the kitchen — Sloan's almond milk displacing my half-and-half, her meal-prep containers colonizing the refrigerator shelves I had organized by weekday, her insistence that the blender be left on the counter because putting it away was, she explained, a waste of the life she was trying to live. Temporary explained the living room television, which began defaulting to her shows, her volume, her commentary through every scene. Temporary explained why I started taking my tea in the study with the door half-closed, pretending I was working when I was only hiding.
Christmas arrived with a tree Sloan decorated in a theme she called "modern Nordic," which meant white lights and no ornaments that had belonged to my childhood. The angel Walter and I had bought in 1994 stayed in its box in the attic. When I brought it down anyway, Sloan tilted her head and said, with the soft cruelty of aesthetic opinion, "It's a little… dated, don't you think? We could do better."
Harrison put his hand on my shoulder.