I stood in the dark at the bottom of the stairs and I listened, and I knew the laugh.

It was Adaline.

My brother Colton’s wife.

My sister-in-law, who was supposed to be across town that week caring for her mother, and who was instead in my bedroom with my husband while a blizzard buried the road behind me.

I set the velvet box down on the hall table, very gently, as if it might break.

Then I turned around and walked back out into the snow, and I stood in the freezing wind of my own driveway, and I let the cold finish what it had started — turning grief into something harder, clearer, and far more useful.

Chapter 4 — The Woman I Used to Be

Here is what the cold gave back to me, standing in that driveway: it reminded me who I was before I let a wedding band talk me into being smaller.

I am Delphine Hartman.

Before I was Desmond’s wife, I was the youngest executive ever seated on the board of my family’s company — my father’s company, built out of nothing on a foothill ranch three generations back.

I had spent eleven years making myself convenient.

Softening my edges.

Deferring.

Letting Desmond be the one whose career we scheduled our lives around, whose moods set the weather in our house.