No shouting.
No long arguments.
If something in my home cost money, required work, or belonged to me, I simply stopped pretending I had no right to decide how it was used.
The thermostat was next.
I liked my house at seventy-two degrees.
Harper, however, claimed pregnancy made her unbearably hot. She would turn the air-conditioning down to sixty-five, sometimes even lower, and walk around in shorts while I sat in my own living room feeling like I needed a sweater.
I had asked her several times to use a fan upstairs.
“The doctor says I need to stay cool,” she told me.
One afternoon I came home and the house felt like a refrigerator.
The thermostat read sixty-four.
My electric bill had been nearly three hundred dollars the previous month.
I stood there for a moment looking at that number.
Then I picked up my purse and drove back to the hardware store.
I bought a clear locking thermostat cover.
Ten minutes and a screwdriver later, the thermostat was set at seventy-two and protected by a plastic box. The only key went on my key ring.
Harper discovered it within an hour.
I heard the cover rattling before I heard her voice.
“Georgia!”
I stepped into the hallway carrying laundry.
“What?”
“Why is there a lock on the thermostat?”
“Because the electric bill was three hundred dollars last month.”
“I’m sweating.”
“The house is seventy-two degrees.”
“I need it colder.”
“Then buy a portable unit for your bedroom. Just have David pay me whatever extra electricity it uses.”
She stared at me with the expression of someone encountering a completely unreasonable person.
The strange thing was, I didn’t feel unreasonable anymore.
David approached me that evening and asked for a spare thermostat key.
“No.”
“Mom.”
“When you pay for the cold air, you can control the cold air.”
He didn’t ask twice.
The bedroom
I thought the thermostat might finally make Harper understand that my boundaries were real.
I was wrong.
My bedroom was on the ground floor.
It had an attached bathroom, large closets, and French doors that opened onto the patio. It was the room my husband and I had shared, the room where I had spent years building an ordinary married life with a man I loved.
David and Harper were upstairs in one of the guest bedrooms.
It was comfortable and spacious, but apparently Harper had been looking around my house and making different plans.
One morning I came back from a walk and found her standing in my bedroom with a tape measure.
For a few seconds, I simply watched from the doorway.
She measured the wall beside my dresser, wrote something in a notebook, then stretched the tape toward the window.
“Can I help you?”
She jumped.
Then she straightened.
“I’m measuring for the crib.”
I looked at the notebook.
“In my bedroom?”
“David and I decided this room makes the most sense for the nursery. It gets better light, and the en suite will be perfect for bathing the baby.”