She'd spent three years deciding where to build the house.
Not the house itself — that took eleven months, which everyone agreed was reasonable. The three years were about the site. She'd walk the property with stakes and string, mark a foundation, sleep on it, pull the stakes by morning. She had the soil reports. She had the drainage maps. She had a binder of afternoon light studies organized by month.
"You're overthinking it," her sister said.
She wasn't overthinking it. She was thinking correctly about how many variables were involved. Each placement changed everything downstream: the kitchen window's relationship to the morning, the front door's angle to the prevailing wind, the way snow would drift against which wall. You couldn't isolate one factor without disturbing another.
In April of the third year she stopped. Not decided — stopped. She put the binder in the truck, drove to the property, and stood in roughly the middle of it. She wasn't listening for anything. No dowsing, no intuition, no sign. She just stood where the ground was firm and the slope was gentle and the nearest tree was an oak that would shade the west side in summer and let light through in winter.
She built there.
Years later, a neighbor asked if she'd consulted a feng shui expert. Something about the orientation of the house seemed too right to be accidental. The way the breeze moved through the hallway. The way the garden faced exactly the morning.
"I just stood there," she said.
The neighbor didn't believe her. But it was true in the way that mattered: she'd done all the studying, all the measuring, all the mapping — then she'd stopped consulting the maps and let the ground tell her what the maps already said. The three years weren't wasted. They were the reason standing still was sufficient.
The house settled into the hill the way a stone settles into a streambed. Not placed — arrived at.