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That first evening, the apartment was different.

The leather couch sat in the living room like it had always been there. Nick stretched out on it and for the first time in months, his shoulders dropped. The tension he'd been carrying since Huntsville, since the shelter, since the beginning — it left his body in one long exhale.

Their daughter ran her hands across the kitchen table like she was discovering a new continent. She banged a spoon on the surface and laughed at the sound it made. A table. She had never had a table before.

Courtney stood in the kitchen doorway and watched. The coffee maker was plugged in. The toaster was on the counter. The dressers were in the bedroom with their clothes folded inside — not stuffed in bags, not piled in corners. Folded. In drawers. Like normal people. Like people who live somewhere.

She made dinner that night on a real table. She put her daughter to bed in a real bed. She turned off the lights and lay down next to Nick on a mattress that didn't touch the floor, in a room that didn't echo, in an apartment that had been empty that morning and was now — somehow, impossibly, finally — full.

Not full of expensive things. Full of given things. Full of things that someone didn't need anymore and someone else needed desperately. A leather couch that crossed the city in the back of a green truck. A toaster that changed a life.

Courtney looked up at the ceiling — a ceiling that wasn't falling, that wasn't growing mold, that was just there, solid and safe above her family — and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she didn't think about tomorrow. She didn't plan an escape. She didn't calculate how many days until the next crisis.

She just breathed.

And the apartment breathed with her.

Furniture Bank reserves no judgment. Every person who walks through those doors leaves with dignity. And sometimes, with a toaster that means everything.

Comfort. Dignity. Hope.

The Little Things