“I’ll be up in a minute,” I said.

I sat alone on the couch after her footsteps faded on the second floor.

The house went completely silent except for the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

I picked up the leather album and paged back to the beginning, looking closely at the dates she’d written in ink.

She’d worked twelve-hour shifts in my dispatch office for four straight years before I ever took her to dinner.

When the state tax audit threatened to hold up our interstate permits three years ago, she spent forty-eight hours straight in the file room sorting seven years of freight bills.