1
Ginny calls around ten, just as I’m hanging up with a client. She sounds urgent.
“Margo, it might be perfect.”
I have heard this before.
“Four bedrooms, renovated kitchen, great yard. Right over the DC line—before you ask, yes, it’s in the top-choice neighborhood. And guess what? No one else knows about it! It’s not listed yet.”
That part—the “It’s not listed” part—stops me mid-sip of coffee. It pulls me up from my little desk by the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling window, a hunk of bait just juicy enough to make me forget that it could be wrapped around a sharp, painful hook. Ian comes to a standstill in the kitchen, his hazel eyes zeroing in on me.
“My sister-in-law does yoga with one of the sellers,” Ginny continues, at her usual breathless speed. “He told her they’re putting it on the market at the end of the month. Apparently, his husband got a big new job out of town, so it’s all very rushed. But maybe—and I don’t wanna promise anything here—but maybe that means they’re motivated enough to take an offer now,beforethey list publicly.”
A surge of hope, that familiar poison, makes my heart stutter. This is the fantasy. The urban legend that everyone house-huntingin this godforsaken market latches onto at some point. You hear about a friend of a friend (in my case, it was the cousin of a coworker) who got an inside tip about a house before it hit the market, who swooped in and bought it before the masses could even think about descending. You hope and wish and pray the same thing will happen to you. You take detours through your target neighborhoods, scouting for a moving truck or an estate-sale sign, any hint at all that might give you the jump on a place before it officially comes up for sale. You know the odds aren’t in your favor—and yet it has to happen for someone, right?
Right?
“You’re sure it’s in Grovemont?” I ask Ginny, my voice a stage whisper like I’m afraid the secret will get out. Someone lays on their horn three stories below, a well-timed reminder of why I hate this place so much.
“Sure is, kiddo,” she says. “My sister-in-law’s been inside. She says it’s stunning. I’m in the car, but I’m gonna have Travis send you the address so you and Ian can go have a look from the street. Let me know what you think as soon as you can.”
Even before the email from Ginny’s assistant lands in my inbox, I feel the thing that I promised myself I would stop feeling: a hunch that this house could be The One. Why else would my real estate agent—of all the rabid, razor-elbowed agents in Washington—have been the one to score such an extraordinary piece of intel? Or maybe it’s that Ihaveto believe it’s the one. Like a self-preservation thing. Because otherwise, I am terrified that we have really, truly, finally run out of options.
Ian and I have been stuck here—in an apartment so small you can vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet—for eighteen increasingly hellish months. The first six or seven of those drifted by in a kind of placid denial. We still fucked like it would be ideal if I got pregnant immediately, like obviously we’d be out of here and settled into the new house whenever the baby arrived. This wasalways part of the plan, after all, when we decided to sell our starter home. We had to get the money out of it if we were ever going to afford the dream house in the burbs, so it was unavoidable that we’d have to spend a little while renting.
And it’s not like we went in totally blind. We sold the last place—a falling-apart row house almost far west enough to count as Logan Circle—in the fall of 2020, the point in the pandemic when everyone realized that if Covid didn’t suffocate them, spending another minute within the same four walls probably would. DC, like everywhere else, was already in the middle of a housing shortage and now hordes of buyers desperate for more space were making it infinitely worse. But when you’re a gentrifier, this is the moment you pounce. Ian and I had lived in that row house for nearly a decade. We’d debated “Gunshots or fireworks?” almost as frequently as “Thai or Mexican food?” When you invest in a “transitioning” neighborhood, that’s just what you sign up for. The payout on the other side—once the city’s hottest restaurants have opened a few blocks away, once you’re within walking distance of not one, but two Whole Foods—is the reason you slog through.
So, yeah, I knew it might take a minute to find the forever home, but clearly, this was the time to cash in. And who could argue with that logic after the row house, even with its flooding basement and bad DIY kitchen reno, sold in a single weekend for more than double what we’d paid?
At first, my plan seemed to be working. Less than a month after we moved into the apartment, a house that checked all the boxes hit the market. It was a fully remodeled 1940s Colonial (my favorite style), in Grovemont (my favorite neighborhood), well under our budget. I thought maybe we wouldn’t even have to pay for a second month on the storage unit.
Then it got twenty-two offers.
Twenty-fucking-two.
“Now you’ve got the first bidding war outta the way,” Ginny hadsaid with a shrug, after informing us that it sold for $25,000 higher than our offer. “It’s like a rite of passage, and now we know we’ll just have to be a tad more aggressive next time.”
But that was ten “next times” ago.
The next few bidding wars played out pretty much the same, except the numbers kept getting worse. We’d go to $1.1 million and fall just short. So, for the next house, we’d stretch to $1,150,000, only for the winner to offer the same amount—all cash.
After loss number five, I froze my eggs just in case.
At that point, we’d been in the apartment about eight months, and trying for a baby for nearly a year. Dr. Warner convinced us it didn’t make sense to start in vitro yet—she still thinks I might get pregnant the old-fashioned way once the stress of the house hunt is over. And it’s true that if we wound up taking out a loan for multiple rounds of IVF, it could complicate our mortgage approval. But when you’re staring down the barrel of turning thirty-eight, you can’t afford to take any chances. While we waste away here in real estate purgatory, at least I know I have a viable batch preserved on ice.
Although to be honest, that fact hasn’t been as comforting as I’d hoped. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep all I can think isNo house, no baby; no house, no babyon an endless, agonizing loop.
In hindsight, number six (a split-level with a kitchen that needed a full gut) and number seven (a cute-enough Craftsman, but on a very busy street) were duds that only seemed worth trying for because we were starting to panic. Eight, nine, and ten trickled onto the market at such a glacial pace, weeks and weeks passing between them, that I was convinced the housing supply was about to dry up entirely. Which is why, when number eleven finally came on, I decided we had to push harder. It was another Colonial, a couple miles farther from the city than we preferred but still zoned for the right schools. They’d blown out the primary suite so the bathroom could fit a soaking tub. The nursery was right next door. I talked Ianinto tapping into our 401Ks so we could raise our budget to $1.3 million—a full $250,000 above the asking price. How could that possibly not be good enough?
By the time Ginny called, my whole nervous system felt like it had been hooked up to jumper cables. We were out to dinner with friends, so I excused myself and answered from the sidewalk: seventeen bids had rolled in. Seven, including the winning one, were all cash.
We were losers for an eleventh time.
I texted Ian from outside the restaurant, then left him there to explain my disappearance and pay our half of the bill. After I spent the weekend holed up in the bedroom, crying and bingeingBelow Deck, he started hinting that I should go back to a therapist. I convinced him I was fine (because I was), but that was two months ago now. Nothing halfway decent has even come available since.
“What was that about?” Ian asks, coming around the kitchen counter, oblivious to the ring that his coffee mug has left behind on the white quartz.
I brush past him, already en route to get my Nikes by the front door. “Ginny says there’s a house that could be perfect, and we have to see it now ’cause—get this—no one else knows about it yet.”
