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restrooms. She leaned back against the wall. Well, we might need a little more room, she remembered now, was what Winnie had said, that afternoon, turned away and fussing with some grocery bags. Rachel had assumed she meant a two-bedroom condo! So Winnie had known, even then. Why hadn’t she said anything?
    But Rachel knew why, and she closed her eyes. It was cooler downstairs, quiet. Her heels sank into the thick, salmon-colored carpet, and she could feel the grainy pattern of the metallic toile wallpaper against her bare shoulders. On the one hand, she had sympathy for her mother’s position. Rachel’s own move, last year, certainly made it hard, if not impossibly awkward, for anyone to raise the subject of Hartfield real estate in her presence.
    Melissa called it “the switcheroo,” and Winnie had been one of its biggest supporters.
    “ Please .” She’d scowled when Rachel once ventured fears about, well, what people would think.
    And there certainly hadn’t been anything on the market, anything close to what they would need or could afford, without changing the girls’ school midyear. Neither Lila nor Mel had protested once the plan was explained to them—though probably this wasn’t healthy—and Bob was just relieved, happy to find a solution, a way of accepting that leave of absence…and so that left Rachel. She had signed on, full of misgiving, and so they had moved. If you could call it that, when their address, 144 Locust Drive, didn’t even change.
    Their house’s attached two-bedroom rental unit had intimidated Bob when they were first shown the property, that summer beforeLila was born. He hadn’t liked the idea of being a landlord, hadn’t liked the word itself, and had visions of endless tenant disputes, late-night phone calls about plumbing problems. But both Rachel and their Realtor, Billie, had convinced him otherwise, Rachel so deeply in love with the square-sided painted-white brick house on Locust that she felt she would happily plunge any stopped-up toilet herself, even seven months pregnant. And even Bob would admit that everything had gone smoothly. Billie always took care of finding the right people, and the renters had been a series of quiet young couples on the first leg of their exodus from Manhattan, a lot like Rachel and Bob had been. Mostly, they got pregnant and then moved out. Meanwhile, Rachel and Bob—and later Lila and Melissa—paid hardly any attention to that part of the house, or the round pale stones paving a discreet path around to the separate side entrance.
    Then, last year, several factors aligned all at once, like tumblers in a lock clicking into place. Once it became clear that Bob was struggling to keep up, the partners at his firm offered a year’s leave at half pay—or demanded one. (It was never made clear to Rachel which.) The Copenhavers, who had rented for almost three years, decided to move to Boston and open a health-food store, and gave only one month’s notice. And Billie, when Rachel called in a panic, said that she might have one prospect, a single banker who traveled a lot…but that he wanted something bigger than their unit. Something much bigger.
    So the plan was hatched: keep the house, lease the main part, live in the smaller unit. For a while, until Bob got back on his feet. It wasn’t unheard of , Billie assured them, but this didn’t really hold true for Rachel. In a matter of weeks, the Brighams went from four bedrooms to two, from three full baths to one and a half, from thecenter of their home to its shoved-off-to-the-side appendage. Or at least that’s how Rachel felt, especially on the nights where she would lie awake and listen to Vikram Desai, a perfectly pleasant man, a total stranger, move around her kitchen. She’d follow his footsteps across the cream-colored tiles she’d chosen six years ago, up the stairs where the girls posed for Christmas photos, and into what used to be her bedroom. Hers and Bob’s, that is.
    Here