The interrupted dinners.

The trips rescheduled at the last minute.

The weekend duties, the deployments, the whole unpredictable shape of a life lived around the Navy’s needs.

And she seemed to accept, too, the thing that mattered most to me, which was that Rebecca’s memory would always have a place in our home, that I was not a man looking to erase his first marriage and start clean.

Brenda appeared genuinely warm toward Hannah in those two years.