She gripped her phone and tried to tamp down her annoyance. “Akiva! I am okay with it. Your parents are not”

Score, score, score.

She was just getting around to opening the last box and the crochet toy rattles were exactly what she was looking for. She couldn’t find the exact same thing in China, but had found something that looked close enough, and the crochet and wooden rattles were even cuter than they’d looked on screen.

She laid them out on a cream velvet tray and arranged the tray artfully in one of the Ikea Kallax boxes the fourth guest room was now filled with. The middle of the room held a small table and chair, also in cream, with a single gold notebook and matching pen lying delicately on the surface. The entire room was a study in understated elegance.

“And the best part,” she said to Akiva, “is that the price for this elegance is affordable. Manageable. Obtainable.”

For someone who had lived the past 15 years in a reality consisting of the opposites of all of those adjectives, she was ridiculously happy about it.

Almost too happy to ruminate over the fact that Akiva was firmly in the doghouse. And she was on thin ice again, after opening her mouth about Dassy.

Akiva lay down on the plush carpet. Libby had asked him to take off his Manolos.

“The rug is just so clean,” she’d said apologetically.

Clean rugs. It was a trite metaphor, but she couldn’t help comparing it to Mom and Dad’s Persian rug. Hand-knotted, antique, and covering mounds of dirty family laundry.