A year after the wedding that didn’t happen, Emily and Noah came to have dinner with me in the new house.

I had sold the place in Greenwich.

Not because Rebecca took it — she never did — but because I no longer wanted to live inside rooms full of empty memories, with a camera watching every door, in a house I’d nearly signed away.

I bought something smaller in Westport, ten minutes from Emily, and Noah has a bedroom there with blue walls and dinosaur curtains that he picked himself.

After he fell asleep that night, Emily and I sat out on the patio, where the air smelled of wet earth and of the bakery down the street, and I finally asked her the question I’d been carrying for a year.