The evening he came home with the listing for the Brentwood house, his expression was the particular one I had learned over years of marriage to read as already decided. He had printed the photos. He had driven past it. He had already mentally arranged our furniture in rooms he had not been inside. The asking price, he acknowledged when I pressed him, was at the very outer limit of what a conventional lender would approve—and that was before accounting for the down payment the seller required to take us seriously in a competitive field.
His financing was not what it looked like from outside. He was a commercial real estate broker with a good reputation and some genuinely impressive deals behind him, but that year had been difficult. Two projects he was personally guaranteeing had run over schedule and budget. He was carrying more short-ter
