Ethan stayed on his knees by her chair for a long while, the three of us talking in the low, easy way we hadn’t managed in years — about his flight home, about his unit, about the strange miracle of all of us being in one room.

And then he got up, and stretched, and wandered the small living room the way you do when you’re re-learning a place, and he stopped at the corner desk.

At my desk.

Where the neat stacks were.

The folders, the rubber-banded ledgers, the labeled envelopes — seven months of my system, all of it lined up square to the edge of the desk the way I kept it because keeping it square was one of the few things I could control.

He picked up the main ledger and slid off the rubber band and opened it, and I watched him go still as he turned the pages.