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Jax carries the couch alone. Down four flights. He turns it through the stairwell corners like it’s a gurney, sets it in the truck, and comes back up eating a protein bar he didn’t have on the way down.

“Where’d you get that,” I say.

“Jacket pocket.”

“You carried a couch with a protein bar in your pocket.”

“I carry everything with a protein bar in my pocket. It’s called readiness.” He surveys the apartment – the boxes, the bare walls, the garment rack standing alone in the bedroom like the last man at a party. “You keeping that?”

Preston appears in the doorway looking like he’s attending a funeral he’s not ready for.

“The rack stays,” Preston says. “It goes to the curb with honour. It held the line, Jax. Two years, one drywall anchor failure, zero collapses. It deserves to be remembered.”

“It’s a metal pole.”

“It was a metal pole with a job.”

We carry the rack down together, Preston and I, and he sets it by the curb and adjusts it so it stands straight, and I pretend not to see him pat it once before he walks away.

The last thing out is the Breville. Preston carries it himself, wrapped in two towels and his weighted judgment, buckled into the back seat of the car like a dignitary.

At the door, Preston stops. The apartment is bare. The radiator sits under the window, silent for once, off-duty.

“One second,” he says.

He walks over and puts his hand flat on top of it. The radiator does nothing, because it’s a radiator.

“It was our song,” Preston says.

“It was a plumbing defect.”

“It was our plumbing defect, Luke.”

We lock the door for the last time and leave the keys with the super, and Elena rides to Brooklyn in the moving truck with Jax, arguing about merge etiquette, and my husband drives us across the bridge to the house with the green door with an espresso machine belted in behind us like our firstborn.

The brownstone swallows everything we own and asks if that’s all.

The couch that filled the walk-up sits in the parlour like a postage stamp on a table. Max is waiting at the Brooklyn end – he scheduled his own arrival in the shared calendar he created for the move (event title: DEPLOYMENT, PHASE TWO) – and he takes one look at the couch and produces a laser measure.

“It’s off-centre.”

“It’s off-centre on purpose,” Preston says. “It’s conversational placement. It creates flow.”

“It creates a pinch point at the parlour door. You lose eleven inches of egress room. I’ve measured.”

“You lose eleven inches of soul with it flush to the wall, Maxwell.”

They argue for forty minutes. They move the couch six times. It ends up within an inch of where Jax originally set it down, both of them claim victory, and neither of them thanks Jax, who’s on his third protein bar and has carried every heavy object in the house with me while the York brothers debated sightlines. This, I’m told, is how they’ve always loved each other – at volume, over placement, with measuring implements.

Our entire kitchen fits in four of the new cabinets. Elena takes the guest room on the second floor, sets down two suitcases, and says, “Temporarily,” to nobody, and the word echoes slightly, because the room has high ceilings now.

Which is how, on the second day, we end up at IKEA.

House rule, drafted at the kitchen counter and appended to the menu contract: shared furnishings come from shared earnings, and shared earnings have a budget. Preston agreed to the rule like he was taking holy orders. Then he asked what IKEA was.

“You know what IKEA is.”

“I know of it,” Preston said. “The way I know of Thailand. I’m aware it exists and that people return from it supposedly changed.”