People have asked me since how I knew — how a single new sleeping habit could tell me so much, when a man could have simply grown more affectionate in three years apart.

And the answer is that the body does not lie the way the mouth does.

A man can rehearse an alibi, launder a scent, invent a business dinner.

But the way he holds another person in his sleep is not a decision; it is a habit, worn in over hundreds of nights, and habits carry their history with them.

Spencer had never held me like that in eleven years — had always slept on his back, a careful foot of mattress between us, a man who did not like to be crowded even by his wife.

And he had come home from three years away having learned, in his body, in the unthinking place below all his cleverness, to sleep curled around a woman with his arm across her waist.

He did not learn that alone in a hotel room.

You do not teach yourself to hold someone.

Someone teaches you, night after night, until your sleeping body does it without being asked.

So when his arm settled over me that first night as though it had a memory of its own, I did not need a private investigator to tell me the rest.

His body had already confessed the whole three years, in a single gesture, before he ever said a word — and the only real question left was whether I would let myself keep pretending I had not felt it.

Chapter 2 — The Scent He Couldn’t Wash Off

For three years I had waited for him to come home while he ran a major expansion for Halstead Global out in Seattle.

We were going to have children when he got back.