Nia almost thanked her. Instead she said, "Help me pack the photographs. I don't trust myself not to break the glass."
They wrapped the frames together. Wedding day. Pier. Amara with frosting. A photo Nia had forgotten—Marcus holding newborn Amara in a hospital chair, looking wrecked and holy. Simone handled that one with particular care and said nothing, which Nia decided was a form of respect.
Marcus and Amara returned with flushed cheeks and a story about a dog that had escaped its leash and been captured by a teenager on a skateboard. The story made Amara laugh until she snorted. For a moment the house felt almost ordinary. Then the moving truck crew knocked and ordinary ended.
The crew was fast and impersonal in the way of people who carry other families' pianos for a living. Nia watched their sofa go out the door and felt her chest seize. She watched Amara's mattress tilt around the landing. She watched the console table—empty now of photographs—slide into daylight. Marcus signed inventory sheets. Simone coordinated. Nia stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw locked and let the leaving happen because stopping it would have been theater, not salvation.
By one o'clock the house echoed. Their footsteps sounded wrong on the hardwood. Amara's voice bounced off bare walls. Nia walked through each room once more, opening closets that held only hangers, touching the banister where Amara's handprints had lived in invisible oils. In the kitchen she found, behind the refrigerator, a crayon drawing Amara must have slid there months ago: three stick figures and a square house and a yellow sun with a smiley face. Nia held it carefully and cried without sound. Marcus found her like that and did not try to take the paper. He just stood nearby until she could breathe again.
"I'm not ready," she said.