Chapter 2

Grief has a way of returning at strange times, and that's the closest word I can find for what I felt in days after the anniversary dinner.

Not grief for anything I'd lost yet, because I hadn't lost anything yet, not that I could prove.

It was more like the shadow grief casts ahead of itself, the way a storm darkens the sky long before the first drop of rain actually falls.

I went through my daily routine the way I always had.

I made Nathan's coffee — two scoops, not one and a half, the way he liked it, a habit so worn into my hands that I could do it half-asleep.

I packed Zane's lunch, cutting his sandwich into the triangles he insisted on, because apparently squares were for babies now, a distinction he'd become very serious about since starting kindergarten.

I drove him to school and waved until the building swallowed him, the way I did every morning, and then I sat in the car in the parking lot for longer than I needed to, with my engine running doing absolutely nothing except trying to talk myself down from a feeling I didn't have a name for yet.

It wasn't suspicion exactly. Suspicion implies a kind of clarity, a direction, a thing you're actually looking for.

What I had was smaller and messier than that — an itch under the skin, a low hum of unease that followed me from room to room and refused to resolve into anything I could point to and say, there, that's what's wrong.

I hated it. I want to be honest about that.

I hated the way it made me feel like a suspicious wife, the kind of woman who checks a husband's phone, who reads too much into a single glance, who turns a perfectly ordinary evening into evidence of something sinister simply because she's bored, or insecure, or ungrateful for what she has.

I had spent four years being careful never to become that woman, because becoming her would have meant admitting there was something in this marriage worth being suspicious of, and admitting that would have meant admitting that Grace's kindness — the single most important act of love in my entire life — might have delivered me into something I didn't actually want.

So I sat in that parking lot, hands on the wheel, and told myself, gently, the way you'd talk down a frightened child: You're imagining things.

Nathan loves you. Nathan has always been strange about his phone, this isn't new, you're building a house out of one uncomfortable dinner and nothing else.

It almost worked. It worked enough to get me through the drive home, through unloading the dishwasher, through folding a basket of towels while some quiet, syndicated talk show murmured in the background, filling the silence I'd started finding unbearable.

I called Grace that afternoon, mostly because I needed the sound of a voice that had never once given me a reason to doubt it.

"Darling," she said, warm the way she always was, and something in my chest loosened just slightly at the sound of it.

"How are you? How's my favorite great-grandson-adjacent person?"

I laughed, actually laughed, surprising myself. "He's obsessed with volcanoes this week.

Apparently there's one making a new island somewhere, and he's very concerned we haven't gone to see it in person."

"Well, we simply must remedy that. Bring him by this weekend, I'll show him the atlas his grandfather kept, it has all sorts of things marked in it." A pause, and then, softer, "You sound tired, Amelia."

"I am, a little."

"Is everything alright? With Nathan, I mean."

There was something careful in the way she asked it, careful in a way that made me wonder, for one disorienting second, whether she already knew something I didn't.

But that was absurd, I told myself immediately. Grace adored Nathan.

Grace would never have kept something from me that concerned him, not after everything she'd already given me, not after nine years of never once making me feel like anything but her own.

"Everything's fine," I said. "Just tired. It's been a long few weeks."

"You work too hard, sweetheart. You always have. Even as a girl — I remember you'd stay up finishing homework long after you should have been asleep, just so you wouldn't fall behind.

You've never once let yourself simply rest."

Her voice softened further, the particular tenderness she reserved just for me, the tenderness of a woman who had chosen, out of the whole world, to make room for an orphaned fourteen-year-old girl in her home and her heart.

"You deserve rest, Amelia. You deserve so much more than you ever ask for."

I sat with that after we hung up, turning it over, feeling the particular ache of being loved so completely by someone whose grandson I could no longer be certain I actually knew.

That night, after Zane was asleep and the house had gone quiet in the particular way houses do once the day's noise has finally drained out of them, I found myself standing in the doorway of Nathan's home office, watching him work.

He didn't notice me at first.

He sat with his laptop open, the blue light of the screen catching the lines of concentration on his face, and for a moment I let myself simply look at him — really look, the way you look at someone when you're trying to remember why you fell for them in the first place, searching their face for the version of them you first believed in.

He was handsome in the same way he'd always been handsome, sharp-jawed, dark-haired, the kind of face that photographed well at every family event Grace ever hosted.

But it wasn't his face I'd married. It was something underneath it — or something I'd believed was underneath it, four years ago, when Grace knelt in front of me and told me he needed someone who wouldn't leave.

I thought about the phone. The lowercase letter.

The way his expression had gone smooth and unreadable the moment it lit up at dinner.

"Hey," Nathan said, finally looking up, catching me in the doorway.

"You okay? You look like you're somewhere else."

"Just checking on you," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to, almost sad, though I hadn't intended for it to sound that way.

"I'm fine. Just finishing up some numbers before tomorrow."

He smiled at me, easy, unbothered, the smile I'd fallen asleep next to for four years without once questioning what might be sitting underneath it.

"Come here."

I crossed the room and let him pull me into his lap, the way he used to when we were newlyweds, before life and grief and gratitude had worn certain grooves into the shape of our marriage.

I let my head rest against his shoulder, breathing in the familiar smell of him — soap, faintly of coffee, something underneath that I'd once thought of as simply home.

"I love you, you know," he said quietly, into my hair.

"Even when I'm buried in work and terrible at showing it. I hope you know that."

I said it back. I meant it, or some old, tired version of me still meant it, the version that hadn't yet learned to hold two contradictory truths in the same hand — that I could love him, and also be starting, quietly, unwillingly, to fear what loving him might have cost me without my knowledge.

I didn't sleep well that night either.

But I stayed in his arms until he fell asleep, memorizing the weight of him, the sound of his breathing, some part of me already grieving a version of this marriage I hadn't yet confirmed was lost.