I had been worried about our second loss that year, but I still believed we were a team dealing with something painful together.

Laura glanced over my shoulder.

“You don’t have to decide what that picture means today.”

“I keep trying to figure out when it became a lie.”

“Maybe some of it was real,” she said.

“That doesn’t make what he’s doing now acceptable.”

I put the picture in a drawer, not the trash.

I wasn’t ready to perform a clean ending for anyone, even myself.