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 approved a contract.

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 motions without her even having to think about it. Grind, pour, wait. She'd made that same cup of coffee so many mornings that her body could do it half-asleep, in the dark, without turning on a single 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 same yellow house with the crooked mailbox, past the same 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 big enough not to need a goodbye anymore. She stood there a second longer than she needed to and watched the door swallow him up.

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

She wasn't sure what she was waiting for. Nothing had actually happened. Nobody had said anything wrong. A phone had buzzed at a dinner three nights ago, and a man had glanced down at it, and that was the whole thing, really, when you said it out loud like that. A glance. A buzz. Nothing you could hold in your hand and call proof.

But it hadn't left her. It sat under her ribs like a splinter too small to find with her fingers, the kind that only tells you it's there when you press on it wrong.

She hated that feeling. She hated it more than she could explain, even to herself. 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 luncheons — women who checked their husband's texts, who counted the minutes he was late, who turned every ordinary evening into evidence of something terrible. She had promised herself, a long time ago, that she would never be one of them.

But 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 asked her, please, for me, to marry her grandson. Amelia had said yes without a single question, because saying no had never once felt like something she was allowed to do.

If something really was wrong — if there was something underneath all of this worth finding — then it meant Grace's kindness, the biggest act of love in her entire life, had walked her straight into something she didn't want. And Amelia wasn't ready to sit with that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

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

"You're imagining things."

It almost worked. 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 some quiet talk show mumbled away on the TV 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 the sound of that one word. "How are you? How's my favorite great-grandson-adjacent person?"

Amelia actually laughed, surprising herself. "Obsessed with volcanoes this week. There's a new island forming out in the ocean somewhere, and he is very upset that 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 it 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."

Something in the way Grace asked that made Amelia's stomach drop, just for a second. It was careful. Too careful, like Grace was picking her way around something sharp on the floor.

Then Amelia shook the thought off. That was ridiculous. Grace adored Nathan. Grace had never once, in nine years, kept something from her that mattered. Not after everything she'd given her.

"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 on anything." 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 the phone. 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 in the way houses do once the day finally drains out of them, Amelia stood in the doorway of Nathan's home office and watched him work.

He hadn't noticed her yet. The blue light from his laptop screen lit up the lines of concentration on his face, and for a second she just looked at him. Really looked. The way you look at someone when you're trying hard to remember exactly why you fell for them in the first place.

He was handsome the way he'd always been handsome. Sharp jaw. Dark hair. The kind of face that photographed well at every single party Grace ever threw.

But that wasn't what she'd married. It was something underneath that face — or something she'd believed was underneath it, four years ago, kneeling on the floor in front of Grace's chair, saying yes before the sentence was even finished.

"Hey." Nathan looked up and caught her standing there. "You okay? You look like you're somewhere else."

"Just checking on you," she said, and it came out softer than she meant it to. 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 might be sitting 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, back before four years of grief and gratitude wore certain grooves into the shape of their marriage.

She let her head rest against his shoulder and breathed him in — soap, faint coffee, something underneath that she used to just call home without thinking twice about it.

"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 version of her still meant it — the version 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 have already cost her.

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

She didn't sleep for a long time after that.