The house was beautiful and Lana hated it, which was an irrational response she was not going to share with Ryan because he had negotiated the relocation package and the relocation package included this house and also an increase in base salary that had felt abstract until she saw the house, which was four bedrooms and a three-car garage on a street so clean it appeared to have been pressure-washed that morning.

"It's beautiful," she said, standing in the driveway on a Tuesday in October with the Wasatch Front behind her going bronze and orange up the ridge, the kind of view that made people move to Utah and then forget that they had moved to Utah until March, when the inversion set in and Salt Lake Valley became a gray soup bowl of trapped particulates.

"It really is," Ryan said. He put his arm around her and she leaned into him and tried to locate the specific problem she was having with a house that was objectively beautiful and came with Ryan's name on the contract and a neighborhood that had, according to the relocation agent, excellent schools and a strong community.

The problem was Denver. The problem was the apartment above the coffee place on Colfax where she'd lived for six years before Ryan, and the warehouse loft they'd rented together when they first moved in, and then the house on Maple where they'd been for three years and where she knew every neighbor's name and three of their dogs' names and the Thursdays when the Thai place on the corner ran their two-for-one and which of the coffee shops had the good wifi and which had the good people-watching.

The problem was that she had built a life, in Denver, and now she was standing in a driveway in Kaysville, Utah with a view of the mountains and a three-car garage and the specific sensation of being a person who had packed everything she knew into boxes and arrived somewhere where nothing had her fingerprints on it yet.

"Community," the relocation agent had said. "Very strong community. These families look out for each other."

Within the first week, Lana received three casseroles and two loaves of homemade bread, all from neighbors whose names she immediately failed to retain because the names were similar and the deliveries were brief and slightly formal, the way of people being welcoming and also establishing gently that there was a specific way things were done around here and it would be appreciated if she found her way to that way in due course.

She went to the neighborhood ward church event — not to participate in the religious component, she told Ryan, who was Catholic in the background-only way that involved Christmas Eve mass and nothing else, just to meet people — and found herself in a Fellowship Hall eating green Jell-O with shredded carrots and listening to a woman explain the carpool rotation for the Wednesday evening youth program.

She drove home at nine PM, poured wine she'd hidden in the pantry behind the dry pasta, and texted her best friend in Denver: *I think I've made a terrible mistake.*

Her friend texted back: *Have you tried the carpool rotation?*

*I genuinely do not have children.*

*Right but maybe offer to drive someone else's?*

She put her phone face-down on the counter and ate leftover takeout and watched the mountains go dark through the kitchen window and told herself this was temporary discomfort and that she was an adaptable person and that things would improve.

She was right, though not in the way she expected.

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