**Part 3**
I had made the mistake of telling Nancy about the house early in the escrow process. She flew in for a brief visit during my second trimester, and I foolishly drove her by the property. She stood on the overgrown front lawn, her eyes scanning the mid-century brickwork, her lips pursed.
“It’s… much smaller than I envisioned for you, Jocelyn,” she had said, her voice dripping with artificial concern. “I assumed I’d have a little more input on the neighborhood. This area is quite… transitional, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t ask for your input, Mom,” I replied lightly, keeping my tone breezy.
I watched her eyes narrow fractionally. I watched her file that tiny rebellion away in the dark, cavernous archives behind her eyes, exactly the way she always did when she was storing up ammunition for a future siege. I should have paid much closer attention to that filing process.
Because a month before my due date, while sorting through the mail, I found a peculiar confirmation postcard from a local logistics company. It was thanking me for scheduling a home consultation for “long-term residential storage solutions.”
I hadn’t scheduled any such thing. And as a cold dread coiled in my gut, my phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. It was an email notification. An invoice for four dozen heavy-duty moving boxes, paid for by a credit card ending in Nancy’s familiar four digits, with the delivery address set to my newly purchased, perfectly sovereign home.
