I felt the floor shift under me.
“What does a few improvements mean?”
“The place needed some updates. Noel and I are working things out, and she and the kids have been staying here, too. And the second bedroom wasn’t really functional as a kids room, so we painted it. Got some new stuff in there.”
There was a long silence that I think he mistook for me processing the information, when in fact I was having a very quiet internal catastrophe.
“You painted my bedroom,” I said.
“One of the bedrooms. It looks great, actually. We did the whole thing in this yellow and white stripe, really bright. The kids love it.”
I hung up.
I booked an earlier flight home that same night. I ate nothing the following morning. I sat in the exit row on the plane and stared at the tray table and thought about everything I was going to find when I walked through that door.
It was worse.
The sage green entryway was gone, painted over in a flat chalky white that looked like something you’d see in a rental unit with a monthly turnover. The brass fixtures I’d installed had been replaced with chrome.
The living room had a sectional sofa I didn’t recognize, blocky and oversized with juice stains on one cushion and a crayon mark along the armrest. My original sofa, a slow mid-century piece I’d saved up for over 4 months, was just gone.
The second bedroom, the room I had carefully arranged as a home office with a writing desk and built-in shelving that I had paid someone to install, had been dismantled. The shelving was stacked against the wall in pieces. The desk was nowhere I could see.
The walls were painted in that yellow and white stripe my brother had mentioned, and there were alphabet stickers running along the baseboard and glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling in a pattern that spelled nothing. My brother’s youngest was asleep in a pack and play in the corner.
My brother was in the kitchen making coffee. He heard me come in and looked up with an expression of such genuine ease that I almost couldn’t speak.
“Hey, you’re back early,” he said. “How was London?”
He said it like I’d been on vacation.