The soon-to-be exes decide to co-own the house, but only the wife will live there, until she doesn’t. Maybe someday there will be more details, more understanding, of how the husband and the wife arrived at this. The short version: over a period of months, there are a number of long, emotionally grueling conversations that should probably have happened years ago, or in couples therapy, or something. No hard-and-fast conclusions are drawn in these conversations. The hardest and fastest conclusion is that on balance, perhaps these two were reasonable enough, had had enough love, had accumulated a few tools to help them get to a place where they were able to say some hard things, and hear some hard things, and emerge without animosity. Mostly. Without more animosity than one might expect a few years later when you hope you’ll be mostly over it.
The husband had renovated most of the kitchen while they were together. Some upper-level cabinets and the windows he planned to build remained unbuilt. Over time, the husband built the windows and installed the windows, and these windows were the real deal, built-from-scratch windows, and they were not just way better than the crap replacement windows that had been put in long before they moved in, they were bigger, made to fit the original window opening that had been bricked up around the smaller, crap replacement windows. And what happened when she went home and looked out the windows almost made her feel like there had never been any windows in there at all. She could see the sky.