I had started wrapping up his dinner in foil and setting it in the refrigerator before I even sat down to eat my own, because I had learned not to expect him at the table.

The plate for one had become the ordinary thing, and the plate for two had become the exception.

I told myself it was the job.

It had always been the job.

But some quiet part of me, the part that pays attention even when you tell it not to, had begun to wonder whether the job was the whole of it.

Chapter 2 — The Empty Chair at the Table

He missed Thanksgiving that year, the whole warm crowded day of it.

He missed our wedding anniversary, the one we had always kept no matter what.

And then, in the spring, he missed our daughter Lily’s eighth birthday, and I watched her blow out her candles glancing at the door, and I made an excuse for him that I was not sure I believed myself.

There were nights he did not come home at all.

The phone would buzz on the counter around the time I had started to hope, and it would be him, his voice worn thin.

“We’re short-staffed, honey,” he would say.

“It’s going to be another long one.

Please don’t wait up.” And I would tell him it was fine, that I understood, that I loved him, and to please be careful driving home whenever he finally did, and then I would hang up and stand alone in the quiet kitchen with the wrapped plate cooling in my hands and feel something I did not have a name for yet, something between loneliness and worry.