Julian had packed it and carried it a thousand miles and slid it under our marriage bed, and I had not known it existed.

I knelt there for a moment with my hand on the cold steel and felt the strangeness of it — that a thing this heavy, this deliberate, had traveled with us the whole way, had sat beneath us while we slept, while Julian turned to me in the dark and I turned to him, and I had not felt it there the way you do not feel the floor give way until you are already falling.

I pulled it out.

It was far heavier than its size suggested, the dense cold weight of a thing built to protect what was inside it.