Nathan took things at face value. She didn’t have to spend every conversation trying to ferret out what he really thought of her.
“Maybe you should have one of these first,” Nathan said with a crooked smile, holding out the beer. Emma’s stomach turned.
I shouldn’t drink.
I need a drink.
She’d waited too long again. Frozen up. He lowered his arm and sighed. “I got laid off,” he said, tossing a little shrug in at the end of the words.
She blinked at him, unsure what the proper facial expression to greet this news should be. How did one convey sympathy while also conveying we are truly, deeply screwed?
“Obviously it’s terrible timing,” he said.
“Nathan, we just had our offer accepted on the house,” Emma said, voice shaking. “We paid the earnest money.” More than ten thousand dollars. With multiple offers, their agent had told them it would help them compete.
“I’m aware of that,” he said, voice a bit clipped now.
Emma pressed her palms to her face. Her cheeks were hot, her hands cold. She could still feel the remnants of the ultrasound gel, dried to tackiness under the waistband of her jeans.
She walked past him, shoulder bumping against his. She crossed the kitchen to the countertop and planted her hands on the Formica surface, staring at the grease stain that had been there when they moved in three years ago.
She straightened up. “Have you called Justin yet?” Justin was the man handling their mortgage, who had suggested that given Emma’s spotty employment history and anemic income, Nathan should be the only one on the mortgage application. Emma had nodded along when he’d said to put the remaining medical bills, credit card bills, and car loan under her name to maximize Nathan’s borrowing power, so now here she was in the negative—on paper, only on paper, they were a team—while Nathan smiled his way into half a million dollars’ worth of house on credit. “The offer. There are—what are they—contingencies. We get our money back if the inspection doesn’t go through, that kind of thing. Is there—”
“I got laid off before we made the offer,” he said. She startled, her mouth dropping open. He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “I had another job lined up. The house was perfect, and I was going to be able to start this week and it wouldn’t even matter, they were paying more, it was golden, and then.…”
“No job,” Emma said, voice strangled nearly to silence. “Nathan, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because it was handled!” he said. “If I’d said anything, the loan could have fallen through. Better to have the new job sorted first. Then the project funding got canceled at the last minute. The position was eliminated.”
A hot fist of nausea lodged behind her breastbone. She’d been feeling a bit queasy lately. Nothing extreme. Not enough to notice, to wonder, not when there was the house hunt and then the mad scramble of putting together offers and getting the preapproval. Not when she’d had her period like clockwork （breakthrough bleeding, they’d called it, not uncommon） and had only gone in for an answer to her sudden, overwhelming fatigue.
The house had felt like a mistake from the start. The letter had arrived informing them that the duplex was going up for sale and they had sixty days to vacate, and she’d wanted to start looking for a new apartment. But Nathan had pointed out that with the rental market what it was, and with him finally having steady employment after a decade of patchwork contracts and canceled projects, it might be the perfect time to buy.
She’d blanched at the idea. Her work, which had once kept them afloat, had cratered after the accident, during the long weeks of her recovery. The rest had dried up after her biggest client went under and others tightened their belts. New websites weren’t the priority when they were trying to keep the lights on. But Nathan had finally landed a permanent position. One that paid well—well enough to （mostly, nearly, almost） pay off their small mountain of credit card debt, Nathan’s student loans, the medical bills from the accident.
“Because I technically lied about my employment, we can’t get the earnest money back,” Nathan was saying. “And we were already on the bubble with the loan approval. Justin doesn’t think there’s any way he can push it through, even if I miraculously get a new job offer tomorrow.” He collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table.
Her mind churned quickly over the possibilities. The closing date would have been a tight turnaround as it was. Finding another rental wasn’t an option until Nathan got a job, not without the cash that had now vanished into the hole of the offer that was too high but worth it, completely worth it, when you think about our life there, our future.