We’d been doing well, and then one Sunday we fell straight back into the old pattern — some nothing disagreement about the kids that opened, underneath, onto all the old cold silence, and Hal did the thing he does, went stony and quiet and untouchable, and I did the thing I do, took the quiet as rejection and got sharp and distant to protect myself, and within an hour we were back exactly where we’d started, two strangers not speaking in a house that felt like winter.

And I lay in bed that night on my side of it, further from him than the width of the mattress, and I thought: maybe Bev was wrong.

Maybe we are too far gone.

Maybe forty years of drift is not a thing you paddle back from, and I am a foolish old woman with a shoebox, and this is just who we are now.

It was the lowest I felt in the whole of it.