Three years of him telling me I was the great love of his life, of him fussing over how hard I worked running my family’s shipyard, of him bringing me something warm every night before bed so I would sleep.

Three years.

And it turned out every night of it had been a performance staged over a grave he was patiently digging.

I keep returning to the tenderness of it, because the tenderness is the part that still, even now, can take my breath.

A man who simply wanted me dead could have done it quickly and coldly.

Callum did something else.

Callum was kind to me, every day, for three years — attentive in the small ways that a woman learns to prize because they’re the ways that are hard to fake.