She grinned and continued, describing the elaborate frosting he’d bought despite never finding a cake to put it on.

The next day my assistant asked why I hadn’t replied to a routine message sent during the outage.

I told her I’d been spending time with my wife.

She nodded as if that were the most ordinary explanation in the world.

I hoped someday it would become ordinary to me too.

Not because our marriage had stopped being extraordinary, but because choosing to be present no longer required a crisis to remind me why it mattered.

A few days afterward, Meredith suggested we keep one evening each week free of meetings and phones.