Her mattress never made it to her room. The mailroom turned it away, and FedEx took it back to the warehouse. The bed frame they accepted, in a box too big for her cubby, so the front desk propped it sideways against the wall behind them. She told us this on the phone, half laughing, half not knowing what to do about it.

We hadn’t seen her in six weeks. She’d been abroad all summer, home for two of them, then straight to Boston for her internship. The mattress was still sitting at the warehouse. She said she’d get it in an Uber, that people do it all the time. So we drove down. We’d have driven down for less.

Her dad carried it up and spent Saturday afternoon on her floor with an Allen wrench, working the frame together bolt by bolt.

We took her to dinner that night, brunch again the next day. She told us stories about people we’d never met like we already knew them. About her job. About the next co-op she’s already applying for, though she hasn’t finished this one. For those two days it felt almost like she’d never left.

Then we drove home, and the house was quiet the way it’s been quiet since she left, except now it was quiet with the specific shape of her missing from it.

I don’t think she misses us the way we miss her. It’s what’s supposed to happen. She has three roommates she loves, a schedule, a city that’s hers now, a life that doesn’t run through checking in with her mother every day. It shouldn’t. But I miss her in the ordinary hours. Cooking for two instead of three. Passing her room and seeing the door open onto nothing.

My husband says her new bed is too soft but that’s the way she likes it, roomy and cozy.

I think about that bed more than I probably should. That it’s holding her up at night in a city we don’t live in, in a room we only saw for two days, put together by the same hands that used to build blanket forts for her in the living room.