I did not understand the difference that night.

But I felt it, and it sat in me like a swallowed stone.

“Keith,” I said, “what did you put in our food?”

His face changed, but only for a second — a crack, there and gone, in a surface I had looked at across a table for thirty years.

“Nothing,” he said.

I tried to stand and my legs did not answer the way I expected.

I reached for the counter and raised my other hand when he moved toward me.