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“Which house?” a colleague asked.

“Eight East Street in New London.”

Nobody in the office believed him.

The prospect of owning her own home left Susette excited but anxious. She started researching the property. The only thing between it and the water was Fort Trumbull, an eighteenth-century octagon-shaped stone fort used by George Washington’s troops in the Revolutionary War. In 1781, Benedict Arnold had led a British assault on New London and captured the fort before setting fire to the city. The navy then acquired the fort when it built its thirty-two-acre base between East Street and the Thames River. Neglect, though, had reduced the historic treasure to a decaying fortress.

The cottage had originally been constructed in 1890 in a more residential part of the city. It had been relocated to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood just after the turn of the century and jammed onto a vacant, postage-stamp-sized lot not much bigger than the footprint of the house. John Bishop, one of the city’s most prominent carpenters, had built the house. After Bishop died in 1893, the house had passed through many hands until fifty-year-old Avner Gregory, a preservationist, had bought it in the late 1980s. Gregory had restored more than thirty-five historic homes in New London.

At 8 East Street, Gregory had removed the crumbling cement-block steps leading from the street to the front and brought in a mason from San Francisco to build redbrick steps. Gregory then accentuated the brick with a white picket fence that he ran across the front porch. He replaced the house’s asphalt siding with cedar clapboard and installed all new doors and windows. Inside, he upgraded the plumbing, added a baseboard heating system, and added a bathroom with a nineteenth-century bathtub to the second floor.

Then he bought the house next door and did all the same things to it. When both houses were completed, Gregory sold them to an individual who bought them as investments. But the investments never panned out, and eventually the two houses ended up back on the market. The longer the homes sat unoccupied, the more overgrown they became. Ultimately, the outside appearance deterred potential buyers from examining the insides.

The neighborhood’s tough appearance didn’t bother Susette. A hodgepodge of industrial properties, warehouses, and old, small homes, the Fort Trumbull neighborhood was cut off from the rest of New London, sandwiched between Amtrak rail lines on the west and the abandoned naval base on the north. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, European immigrants—first Irish and then Italians—settled in the dirty, urban stretch, turning it into a close-knit community of shops, gardens, and pubs. Over the years, the immigrant families never left, passing their homes from one generation to the next. At the height of the cold war, two thousand people worked in the neighborhood at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, then known as the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory. Some of the Defense Department’s top physicists, nuclear scientists, and sonar specialists studied and monitored underwater acoustics in relation to submarine warfare. But after the cold war died down, the Pentagon closed the base in 1995, and the neighborhood began to resemble a ghost town.

Undaunted, the more Susette learned about it, the more she felt she had in common with the house. It needed her, and she needed it.

Haussman called with bad news: the seller had rejected the offer. She wanted $56,000.

Susette did the math. Her joint bank account with her husband had plenty of money in it, more than enough to afford the house. But she never considered that money hers. Her husband had put away a lot of money before they married, and he had earned all the money since then. Besides, she didn’t want him to know she was pursuing her own home.

Instead, she secured preapproval for a first-time homebuyer’s loan for up to $53,500, on the condition that the home gets a paint job before the closing. But she had no money saved for closing costs,