The cold man was who he was.

The warm one was a tool he used.

And she had married the tool, mistaking it for the man, and spent five years waiting for a homecoming that was never going to arrive, because there was no one underneath waiting to come home.

She stood by the desserts and watched him work the room and felt, beneath the familiar humiliation, something new and clarifying — a kind of grief that had already finished grieving.

Then, all at once, the room went quiet.

The owner of the company had arrived.