“Forever is a long time,” he had said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know.”

He dipped the roller into the tray and watched green paint soak into the rough surface. The house wasn’t grand. It had a narrow porch, aging windows, and a basement that smelled faintly of damp cement. The previous owner had left a collection of cracked flowerpots behind the shed.

But the mortgage payment was manageable, the middle school had good reviews, and the yard was large enough for Khloe’s bicycle.

“We can stay as long as it makes sense,” Joseph told her.

“That’s what grown-ups say when they don’t want to promise something.”

He set down the roller.

“You’re right.”

Khloe studied him.

“I want this to be our home,” she said.

That was three years after Sarah died, and Joseph had learned that grief sometimes arrived disguised as a small practical request. A child wanting to keep the same bedroom wasn’t really asking about the bedroom. She was asking whether the floor beneath her could stop moving.

He sat beside her and rubbed a thumb across the corner of a photograph. Sarah was laughing in it, standing in their old kitchen with flour on her nose. Khloe had been six when it was taken.

“I’ll do everything I can to make it our home,” Joseph said. “That’s a promise I can keep.”

For a few weeks, Oak Creek almost made good on that promise for him.

People waved from porches. Someone left a pie at the front door. Marla Bennett, a retired school counselor with a habit of speaking to people as though they were capable of being better than they believed, invited them to dinner twice.

Joseph repaired a neighbor’s broken porch rail and refused payment. He volunteered one Saturday to help repair the fence at the elementary school. He bought a secondhand grill and discovered he was extraordinarily bad at cooking chicken without drying it out.

At his day job, he maintained HVAC equipment for a group of school buildings. The work was physical, predictable, and satisfying. A compressor either started or it didn’t. A faulty circuit could be traced. Most machines didn’t lie to you.