THE BRIDE HE NEVER CHOSE
"Say it."
"I love you," he said, "the same way I said it the first time, badly, in the middle of failing you. Except this time I am not failing you. I am simply sitting in a kitchen that smells like the dry cleaner two floors down, having spent four days as your ally rather than your husband, and I find that the loving hasn't diminished at all in the absence of the marriage's usual architecture. If anything it's gotten plainer. Steadier. I don't need a contract to feel it, Evelyn. I don't need a covenant, or a crisis, or a fire in a grate to spend it by. I simply love you, on an ordinary Tuesday, with nothing at stake in the saying except the truth of it."