Watching for me.

There was nothing loose or sleepy about her.

She looked like a woman who had sat up all night keeping a vigil over something, and the something was my husband.

On the nightstand beside her, squared to the edge, sat a folded sheaf of papers I didn’t recognize, and a pen laid across it at a neat diagonal, and the sight of that pen — that small, deliberate, waiting pen — put a cold finger straight down my spine before I even knew why.

“You’re up,” Victoria said, and smiled, bright and rested and entirely un-drunk.

“I slept so well in here.