The apartment was on the east side of Austin, second floor, two windows in the living room.
Mia moved in on a Saturday in mid-December with Sarah's help and Nathan's truck and a borrowed furniture dolly that kept veering left no matter how they handled it. The apartment was small and clean and entirely hers — the first space she had occupied in three and a half months that did not belong to someone else's generosity.
They moved the couch in first, then the bookcase she and Ethan had bought at a garage sale and never reassembled, which she had retrieved from the storage unit and reassembled herself the previous Sunday with a borrowed screwdriver and a diagram she had found online. Then the boxes. Then the kitchen things. Then, last, wrapped in moving blankets and carried carefully up the
