“He’ll notice if I don’t drink.”

“Then order it and don’t drink it.”

I want to describe that dinner because it is the strangest two hours of my life and because of what happened in the last ten minutes of it.

He was wonderful.

That is the only word.

My husband was funny and attentive and warm for two hours, and he told a story about the first flat we rented on Mayfield that made me laugh out loud, involuntarily, in a restaurant, twenty-three days after he had stood over my bed.

He asked about the library conversion.