My mother didn’t say hello. She said, “You have forty-eight hours to move your things,” the way you’d inform someone about roadwork on their commute route, with the brisk impatience of a person delivering facts that do not require discussion. “That house is Stephanie’s now.” I was standing in a narrow clerk’s office just off Courtroom 4B, holding a stack of tenant affidavits and waiting for a judge who had turned a fifteen-minute recess into twenty-seven. Through the frosted glass in the office door I could see my supervising attorney pacing the hallway, legal pad tucked under one arm, three frightened clients arranged around him like people waiting for weather they cannot stop. The fluorescent lights overhead made the particular insistent sound of fluorescent lights in rooms built before anyone considered what it would be like to spend forty hours a week beneath them. Someone down the corridor had burned microwave popcorn. My navy flats had developed a pinch at the heel that I had been meaning to address for two weeks.