Isabel had a rule: never sign a lease longer than six months. She had lived in twelve cities across four continents. She had friends on every time zone. People admired her freedom. At thirty-four, in a rented flat in a city she liked but didn't love, she lay awake one night and tried to remember the last time she had felt at home. She couldn't. Not because no place had been good enough, but because she had always known she would move on. The knowledge itself had kept her at a distance from everything. She was free, she realised. She was also, in a way she hadn't expected, quite alone.

Isabel extended the lease. She bought plants — actual plants, which required the assumption of staying. She introduced herself to the neighbour she'd been nodding at for four months. She found a café she went to on Saturdays. She started a course on something she'd always wanted to learn. None of it was dramatic. None of it required courage in any obvious sense. But for Isabel, choosing to settle down was the most disorienting thing she had done in years — because it required trusting that a single place, chosen deliberately, could be enough. The surprising discovery was that it was.