I finally bought my dream house and invited my family to come see it. No one showed up. Later that night, my dad texted, “We need to talk about the house.” By then, something inside me had already shifted.

The internet moved on, as the internet does. The sign post became old news. New scandals arrived. Other people’s families exposed themselves in comments sections and leaked audio and passive-aggressive holiday newsletters. I was grateful for the forgetting. Public attention is not a home. It is weather.

The actual home remained.

One evening in early autumn, almost two years after I bought the house, I found the original notebook.

Not the photocopied page my father had sent. The notebook itself. It had somehow ended up in a box of childhood things my aunt mailed me after my mother decided to “declutter the attic with a vengeance,” which was exactly the kind of sentence my mother would use to describe a process that mostly involved redistributing her own emotional labor to others.