I was watering a plant.
“Because it’s your laundry.”
“I don’t have any clean yoga pants.”
“The washing machine works.”
She looked toward the laundry room.
“You’ll need detergent, though. Mine is in my room.”
I kept watering my plants.
Harper stood there looking at me as though some essential household service had been unexpectedly discontinued.
In a way, it had.
For months, I had been acting like the unpaid staff of a woman who increasingly treated me as an inconvenience.
When I stopped, the amount of invisible work I had been doing became obvious.
Boundaries are funny that way.
They can sound small when you describe them individually.
Buy your own groceries.
Wash your own clothes.
Pay your own bills.
Don’t enter my bedroom.
But together, those boundaries had weight.
And Harper kept running into them.
The baby shower
The baby shower happened on a Saturday.
Harper never asked if she could host it at my house.
She informed David, who relayed the information to me with the uncomfortable look he wore whenever he knew his wife had overstepped.
I had errands that day and decided not to argue about it.
I finished earlier than expected and pulled into my driveway around two.
Cars were parked everywhere.
When I stepped inside, I could hear women talking and laughing in the living room.
Then I noticed the hallway.
My photographs were gone.
All of them.
Pictures of David as a child.
His graduation.
Family vacations.
My husband.
Our wedding.
The walls looked strangely empty without them.
I walked into the living room.
Harper had replaced the photos on my mantel with ultrasound pictures and professionally styled maternity photographs of herself.
Then I saw my wedding picture.
It had been shoved onto a low bookshelf behind gift boxes.
For one moment, that hurt more than anything else she had done.
The photograph wasn’t valuable to anyone but me.
My husband was smiling in it, young and nervous, with his hand at my waist.
That picture belonged in the center of my home because he had belonged in the center of my life.
Harper saw me.
“Oh, Georgia. We didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“I can see that.”
Her friends grew quiet.
I didn’t make a scene.