Sloane did not know if she could take another year of living in the burbs, in this neighborhood, in this apartment most of all. 

And especially in this town, where they did not even have an established play group that she could bring her now two year old daughter to, for a mere break and some adult conversation. 

And worst of all, their apartment, so ghastly in it’s appearance and well, that musty smell too that was worse after it rained and seemed to come up from the carpet. 

What Sloane would give to have a house like all the famous moms on her Instagram scroll, the TikTok moms that showed off their presentable, perfectly painted houses. Fresh breezy curtains with Italian looking blue and white prints for the floor to ceiling windows. White carpets to step off onto with polished manicured toes right under the gleaming glass shower doors. And just the right attention given to the family portraits hanging on the wall in neatly dusted silver frames.

Sloane's cracked three seater kitchen table which had been wiped down so many times on it’s once smooth veneer, sprayed with an entire bottle of Windex one time in the not so distant past, still refused to look clean and shiny. 

She served herself a strong coffee with coconut milk and sat here at her kitchen table as it taunted her while she gazed outside at the crows fighting over something across the way near the sliding glass door of the apartment in the next unit. 

She mulled over what her future would hold someday, which of late was rather ridden with a foreboding, while she waited for her daughter to stir in her crib signaling the she was ready to get out and embrace this day. This day that Sloane was still waking up to.

I will never have.

I will never get.

I will never.

But I so deserve… But do I?

These statements, these doubtful statements stung in her mind and they filled her with an unsettling, a jealousy, that she was easily willing to overlook. 

Nick, her husband of now four good years had just started yet another business. “This one is really gonna fly,” he had said. 

“It has all the bells and whistles that investors are looking for these days,” Nick had said after she had sobbed on the front porch that they would never have the roses like in her mother's garden, the smell of freshly cut lilacs in a vase at the center of the dinner table right in between two pillar candles. 

And nor would they have a house, a real house, that their daughter would fondly remember her growing up years. Lights adorning the front shrubbery in winter time and tossing her wet snowy boots by the front door to be able to run down the hall in bare feet, on soft clean carpet. 

“It’s an apartment, Nick.”

“Just an apartment.”

“And not even a very nice one at that.”

"No," Sloane had bubbled out of now a rather pathetic mouth full of tears. “Our daughter will have to crawl upon the floor of used carpet, probably that has been peed on by hundreds of poor dogs."

"But Sloane,"Nick had replied, “dogs are not even allowed in these apartment here at The Sunset.”

"Well, okay Nick, I know,” she had said, “but you really don't know anything about what could have been crawling around here at The Sunset, infecting these carpets before we moved in.” 

The Sunset, how Sloane disliked being reminded of the name of the apartments they lived in. Could she just be able to live in a house? Her own house? Their house. A house from a certain neighborhood. Now that she would like to hear. The name of the neighborhood she lived in, not the name of some ratty old apartments.

"Oh Sloane," he had said longingly, tousling her matted tear struck hair, "my company is gonna take off and I will buy you the house of your dreams. We will put entirely new carpet in it if you want and you can be the one to pick it out."

But that was then. 

And the events of the future were still yet to come. The carpet color was never going to be the end.