We had looked at 5 houses already that day. By all definitions, Evie was a trooper. She led us through each house like a pint-sized realtor, saying "That's a nice kitchen" or "Time to go upstairs!" By the time we got to the last house, it was nearing naptime and lunchtime and any reasonable almost-3-year-old would have run out of good humor.
Evie didn't know that her parents had seen this house once before, nearly a month earlier, on our first day of house hunting. It was an improbable choice: farther out in suburbia than we had envisioned, a different floor plan than we had pictured, and firmly outside of our price range. But we had looked anyway, and something about that house stuck with us.
