Chapter 6

When we’d just bought it, we spent many long evenings making plans and discussing options. We’d share a bottle of wine and make long lists of things we wanted, things we deemed necessary in what was going to be our forever home. The lists started outrageously—a wine cellar bigger than the actual house with an employee who turns the bottles? Really, Zakarias?—but distilled into a few reasonable items. So Julian’s dream of the biggest bathroom in the northern hemisphere—a Bath Palace, Zakarias, not a bathroom—complete with a pool, a jacuzzi, a sauna, and every other imaginable luxury, turned into a more feasible-sized room with a fancy walk-in shower and a separate bathtub with jets—both of them big enough to accommodate the two of us. It also has a heated floor and double sinks. And my favorite feature the tiny lights over the bathtub, sprinkled in the ceiling like a starry sky.