Chapter 2

"Mom, squares are for babies."

Zane said it with the kind of seriousness only a five-year-old can pull off, watching Amelia cut his sandwich into two neat rectangles.

"Since when?"

"Since kindergarten." He said it like that settled the whole matter, like a judge closing a case. "Triangles. Everybody knows that."

She cut it again, into four triangles this time, and slid the plate back in front of him. He looked it over, nodded once, and picked up a piece like he'd just signed off on a deal.

It was a normal morning. That was the strange part. Nothing about it should have felt hard.

She made Nathan's coffee the way she always did two scoops, not one and a half, her hands moving through the steps without her even thinking. Grind, pour, wait. She'd made that same cup so many mornings her body could do it half asleep, in the dark, without turning on a light.

She packed Zane's lunch into his dinosaur lunch box the triangle sandwich, a small container of grapes cut in half so he wouldn't choke, a juice box he wasn't supposed to have on school days but got anyway, because some mornings you pick your battles, and juice boxes aren't one of them.

She drove him to school, the same ten minute drive she'd made a hundred times, past the yellow house with the crooked mailbox, past the church with the sign that changed its message every week. Today it said GOD IS STILL WORKING ON YOU. She didn't know why that one stuck with her.

She walked him to the door, same as always, and he ran off toward his classroom without looking back, the way kids do once they've decided they're too big to need a goodbye. She stood there a second longer than she needed to and watched the door swallow him up.

Then she sat in the car with the engine running and didn't drive away.

Nothing had actually happened. A phone had buzzed at dinner, a man's jaw had gone tight for one second, and that was the whole thing, really, when you said it out loud. A buzz. A look. Nothing you could hold in your hand and call proof.

But her jaw still ached from clenching it half the night, and she hadn't noticed she was doing it until now, sitting in a parking lot with her teeth pressed together over nothing at all.

She hated that feeling. She had spent four years being careful never to become the kind of wife who built a whole story out of one look at a phone screen. She'd seen women like that at Grace's lunches — women who checked their husband's texts, who counted the minutes he was late. She had promised herself, a long time ago, she would never be one of them.

There was another reason she didn't want to look too closely, and it was uglier than she liked to admit.

Grace had given her a home when she had nowhere else to go. Grace had knelt down four years ago and begged her, please, for me, to marry her grandson. Amelia had said yes without one question, because saying no had never once felt like something she was allowed to do.

If something really was wrong, it meant Grace's kindness the biggest act of love in Amelia's whole life had walked her straight into something bad. Amelia wasn't ready to sit with that. Not yet.

So she gripped the wheel and said it out loud, alone, in the empty car.

"You're imagining things."

It got her through the drive home. It got her through unloading the dishwasher, plate by plate, and folding a basket of Zane's little shirts while a quiet talk show mumbled in the background, filling up a silence that had started to feel too big for the house.

She called Grace that afternoon. Mostly because she needed to hear a voice that had never once given her a reason to doubt it.

"Darling," Grace said, and something in Amelia's chest loosened just from that one word. "How are you? How's my favorite great-grandson-adjacent person?"

Amelia laughed, surprising herself. "Obsessed with volcanoes this week. There's a new island forming out in the ocean somewhere, and he's very upset we haven't flown out to see it in person."

"Well, we'll simply have to fix that. Bring him by this weekend. I'll pull out his grandfather's old atlas, it's got everything marked in pencil. He'll love it." A short pause. Then, softer. "You sound tired, Amelia."

"I am. A little."

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

The question came out slow. Careful. Like Grace was stepping around something sharp on the floor and didn't want Amelia to notice her stepping.

Amelia shook the thought off fast. That was silly. Grace adored Nathan. Grace had never once, in nine years, kept something from her that mattered.

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

"You work too hard, sweetheart. You always have. Even as a girl, you'd stay up finishing homework long after you should've been asleep, just so you wouldn't fall behind." Her voice went even softer, the tone she saved only for Amelia, nobody else. "You deserve to rest. You deserve so much more than you ever let yourself ask for."

Amelia sat with that after they hung up. She turned it over in her head, again and again. Loved that completely, that fully, by a woman whose own grandson she wasn't sure she really knew anymore.

That night, after Zane was down and the house had gone quiet the way houses do once the day finally drains out of them, Amelia carried a cup of tea down the hall toward Nathan's office. The door stood open a crack, light spilling out in a thin gold line across the carpet.

She didn't knock. She never had to.

Nathan sat with his laptop open, and beside it, his phone lit up bright in the dark room. She caught it for less than a second, walking in a photo on the screen, gone before she could really look. A little girl. Dark curls. Not Zane. Not anyone she recognized.

Then the screen went dark on its own, the way phones do, and Nathan glanced up and smiled before she could ask anything at all.

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

Some ad, she told herself. A photo from an article. Nathan followed enough news sites that strange pictures loaded up on his phone all the time she'd seen it happen before, hadn't she? She must have.

"Just checking on you," she said, and it came out softer than she meant. Sadder, too.

"I'm fine. Just closing out some numbers before tomorrow." He smiled at her easy, unbothered, the exact same smile she'd fallen asleep next to for four years without ever once questioning what sat underneath it. "Come here."

She crossed the room and let him pull her down into his lap, the way he used to when they were newlyweds, before four years of grief and gratitude wore certain grooves into the shape of their marriage.

She rested her head against his shoulder and breathed him in soap, faint coffee, something underneath she used to just call home without thinking twice.

"I love you, you know," he said quietly into her hair. "Even when I'm buried in work and terrible at showing it. I hope you know that."

"I love you too," she said.

She meant it. Some tired, old part of her still meant it the part that hadn't yet learned how to hold two different truths in one hand at the same time. That she could love this man, and also be starting, quietly, without wanting to, to fear what loving him might already have cost her.

She stayed in his arms until his breathing slowed and evened out, until she was sure he was asleep.

Then she lay there a long time in the dark, staring at nothing, one small picture stuck behind her eyes that she couldn't quite explain away no matter how many times she tried.

A little girl. Dark curls.

Gone before she could be sure of anything at all.