Eight days before the tender closed on our house, I stood in the driveway explaining, half to myself, how a tender sale differs from a price-by-negotiation one. "Then the house doesn't sell," I said, like naming the outcome out loud might keep it from happening (The Weight of Hours Between Worlds). That night Dot lost the tooth she'd been wiggling all day and, mid-negotiation over how it would come out, found out the tooth fairy had been us the whole time. "Nine years of my life been a lie," she said, and was sworn to secrecy for Lou's sake.
The house didn't sell. Nobody bid on tender day, and the one couple who'd seemed interested went quiet, citing a death in the family (Coastal Whispers: Connection's Winding Thread). A week before that I'd told Jas on the phone I was close to just pulling out and taking us home (Divided Hours, Connected Hearts). A few days after tender closed, we pulled the listing entirely.
Which meant a rental down the road, because we'd already sold the bed and broken down the kids' bunks for staging. Blow-up mattresses, borrowed hot water bottles, and a house behind us that smelled like it had been dressed for strangers instead of lived in (Thirteen Fractured Into Light). A couple of nights later we were still loading boxes and screws into two cars and a van after dark, Lou wandering too close to the road, Dot copping an accidental elbow to the eyebrow from a jump-scare that went wrong (Thresholds Between Ordered and Intimate Hours).
We'd already been eyeing a place on Wesley Road, and somewhere in the middle of all this the plan quietly flipped: buy it without selling ours first, rent the old place out for a couple of years, repaint and sell later once the market's better. "I actually think this is a pretty good, pretty solid plan, to be honest," I told Jas, which is the kind of sentence I say right before it turns out to be true or a disaster (Wellington's Fractured Day: Wind and Wonder).
Underneath all of it sat a job I'd been chasing for weeks, four rounds of AI interviews deep, for a company run by a founder who apparently replies to things with two swear words and nothing else. I got through to the next round, came home, and immediately started converting a number into a monthly figure and getting the currency wrong on the first pass (Vigil in Amber: A Father's Nightwatch). Which was funny in its way, because I'd spent fourteen years running a company and the two since deliberately not: six months off that turned into a year and then two, most of the second spent teaching myself to work the way the machines do. In February I'd started something of my own out of that — Ortomate, an AI product studio — mostly as a vehicle for finding out what I'd actually learned. Nobody was paying me to be certain about it yet.
Somewhere in there, on a dog walk, I told someone we seem to do six years at a time in a house, meaning it as a fact about us rather than a plan. By the end of September we had a house we couldn't sell, a house we might buy anyway, and no real idea which six-year clock we'd just started.
