"We're gonna find a place" Shelly assured Hannah as they were leaving the third house they'd inspected in an hour. None of them had been any good: it'd been an afternoon of minor faults, major flaws, ridiculously over-inflated prices or just plain too much competition. "It'll take a while," Shelly continued, "but it'll happen."

"Okay" Hannah said.

"We've just gotta have faith." Shelly resisted the urge to add: I told you we should look somewhere else, somewhere less popular. "Do you know why it'll happen?" she asked Hannah.

"Why?"

"Because it has to."

Hannah thought: But we don't have to leave. We can stay right where we are.

"We can't go homeless" Shelly said. "It just can't happen." Hannah didn't know if she was saying that because she actually believed it, or if it was just a desperate statement of hope. Shelly didn't know, either. "It'll happen" Shelly repeated. "It'll definitely happen."

"Okay" Hannah said again. All this walking around, minutely inspecting cupboards and bathrooms and cooktops and cracks in walls, had left her tired and needing a drink. Or maybe she'd just woken up that way. "But maybe," she said, "we might have to start lowering our expectations a bit."