“Then he made a miscalculation,” Henry said.

I lowered the laptop screen until only a thin bar of white light fell across the counter.

“He thinks I’m sitting here by myself,” I said.

“Is he going to give us presents?” Henry asked.

“No, Henry,” I said.

“He doesn’t know you exist.”

I stood up, took the toast out of the slots, and set it on a paper plate before pulling four matching blue wool coats, which had cost two hundred and twenty dollars in total, out of the front hall closet.

By eleven thirty that morning, the sky over the regional medical trauma office was clear and pale gray, and the monitors on my desk were full of winter dispatch logs.

Sam sat on the edge of my spare office chair, eating a turkey sandwich off a square paper napkin while I went through the equipment lists for the mountain rescue units.

He reached up with his middle finger and pushed his wire-rim glasses higher on his nose, his eyes fixed on the second monitor, where my personal email folder was pinned open.

“Why does his email address have our last name in the domain?” Sam asked.

“Because he was my husband before you were born,” I said, typing a note about fourteen-hundred-dollar field trauma kits into the system ledger.

“You’ve had his contact saved in your archive folder since two thousand sixteen,” Sam said.

“The system log shows thirty-two automated messages from his company domain.”