The House She Already Owned

I came home from thirteen hours in an emergency room where the air conditioning had failed, the heatwave over the south of France turning every corridor into slow suffocation. In the old stone house in Nîmes, the thermometer read thirty‑eight degrees, the walls holding the day’s heat like a grudge, the sparrows in the courtyard already dead for days. I asked for nothing but ten minutes of breathable air, turned on the air conditioning, and watched my mother‑in‑law cross the room, rip open the electrical panel, and cut the cable with kitchen scissors, shouting about money and laziness, while my husband hid behind his laptop. When he finally murmured, Mom, don’t start, as if I were the problem, something in me went very calm, the kind of calm that arrives when the last argument has already burned itself out… Continues…