When my in-laws asked to store a few boxes in our unused guest room, my wife Sarah and I didn’t hesitate to say yes. What was supposed to be temporary turned into five years of our home doubling as their storage unit. We laughed it off until we discovered Sarah was pregnant. Suddenly, that room wasn’t just cluttered it was our baby’s future nursery. We gently asked her parents to clear it out, but they kept putting it off with vague promises of “soon.”

Eventually, I put my foot down and gave them a hard deadline. That’s when Janet, my mother-in-law, stormed in, found a moth-damaged fur coat among her things, and exploded. She blamed us for the damage and even sent us a $695 invoice to replace it. I was stunned we’d stored her things rent-free for half a decade, and now she was turning it around on us. So, I played her game and sent her an invoice of my own: $9,000, the fair market value of five years’ worth of storage.

Janet ignored the bill, but her husband Greg didn’t. A week later, he showed up at our house, awkward but sincere, and picked up the rest of their belongings. Then, quietly, he handed me an envelope with a check inside. “This is for the storage,” he said, adding that he knew Janet would never do the right thing herself. Sarah and I were stunned but grateful. That check became the seed money for our baby’s nursery.

In the end, the guest room became the cozy, beautiful space we dreamed of. And though Janet tried to sell the damaged fur coat online for triple its value, we didn’t care anymore. What mattered was that our home was finally ours again, and our baby would arrive to a room filled with love not boxes. As for Greg he earned himself a standing invite to taco night.