Last Place You Look

Chapter 61

Our honeymoon wasn't long enough. Coming home was weird and we both stood in the doorway and just looked at our empty house. We'd been so busy for the last three weeks and this was the first moment of pure silence in our normal reality. We literally had nothing to do.

Like I suspected, we were bombarded for pictures and stories before we had even gotten back to North Carolina. It was mostly from our mothers. We told them we would post everything we have so they could see it, but we wanted to get settled back into life before we did.

Harry was also very excited about house hunting. He waited approximately 48 hours after we got home to start looking. I was at work when he started looking and I checked my email to ten different listings. I grabbed my phone during my lunch and called him.

"So you know you just sent me a bunch of house listings, right?"

"Yeah, I was browsing and just happened to find a bunch of really good ones. Not all of them have exactly what we want, but I figured we could change the things that can be fixed. Just look at them?"

"How about I look at them when I get home and we can look together. If we find something we like, then we can schedule something with the realtor and we can do look at whichever ones we like."

And we did that. We looked through the listings. He liked them all, but I only liked five of them. He called the realtors the next day and we set up viewing appointments for that week. They were all really nice houses, and within our price range, but not a single one was right.

This went on for weeks upon weeks. We both had alerts on for houses with what we wanted, but we couldn't agree. None of them had that home feeling for us. It was starting to feel like our dream house didn't exist. And every day we went without finding what we were looking for, the closer Harry got to just building our house himself. I was getting to the point of just settling for something close, but he wasn't having it. He wanted what we said we wanted and wouldn't budge away from that.

Our wedding pictures had come back in late September and he finished putting together the photo album he'd started. He chose the ones he wanted to hang up and put them all in frames, but wouldn't hang them.

"We're so close to finding it. I can feel it."

I was starting to give up, thinking that our house didn't exist and maybe we really would have to just build it ourselves.

That was until the second week of October. He stayed late at the store to do money things and told me to do dinner without him. I was in bed looking through listings and I saw it. It was our house. It had a massive backyard with a fence, four bedrooms, more bathrooms than we wanted, a nice kitchen, and shutters I could paint. There was a small balcony off the master bedroom on the second floor and a nice wooden deck leading to the backyard. I sent the realtor an email the second I got through all the pictures and called Harry as I was sending him the listing.

"Hey, I'm sorry it's so late. I typed a number wrong and everything got messed up and I had to restart." He spoke before I could even say hello.

"That's fine, check your email. Check it now."

"Darling, I'm busy."

"Harry it's our dream house. I found it. It's in your email, I already contacted the realtor to set up a time to go see it. It's got everything we wanted. It's perfect."

"Hold on, I'm opening it now." There was silence on the line and a few mouse clicks from his computer. "Holy shit."

The realtor emailed me back the next morning and I got us an appointment for later that day when both of us were free. She met us at the house. We parked in front of the large garage,  there was space for both our cars. She greeted us with a smile. We walked through the house, seeing every inch of every room.