I stood there watching them turn behind the glass, and the unease I’d been carrying all day sharpened into something with an edge.

People do not launder their wedding-night sheets at dawn out of ordinary tidiness.

People launder something at dawn when they want it gone before it can be looked at.

I didn’t know yet what had been on those sheets.

I only knew that someone in this house had been in a hurry to erase it, and that the someone was almost certainly the woman who had smiled at me from my own bed that morning, rested and clear-eyed and waiting.

That was the moment my marriage stopped feeling like a beginning.