With Rachel gone, weekends were difficult. The city offered a thousand distractions, but many of them were places we'd discovered together. The little Vietnamese restaurant where the owner always asked whether Rachel wanted extra lime. The bookstore with the crooked staircase where we'd spent a rainy afternoon after our second date. A stretch of lakefront path where she'd once stopped to photograph the way sunlight turned the water silver.
At first I avoided those places. Then I began returning to them alone. I ordered soup without explaining why only one person was there. I bought a book and read it in the same corner of the cafe. I walked beside the lake and noticed that the water could still be beautiful without a camera pointed at it. Those visits didn't erase Rachel. They made the city feel large enough to contain more than one version of my life.
Julian and his wife, Nina, invited me over for dinner one Friday. Their apartment was chaotic in a way mine had never been. Their toddler had arranged plastic animals in a row across the hallway, a dog was sleeping on the clean laundry, and Nina was trying to remember whether she'd already put salt in the pasta water. I sat on the floor helping their son build a tower while the adults talked around me. For the first time in weeks I went an entire hour without thinking about the engagement.
After dinner Julian and I stood on their balcony with mugs of coffee. The air was cold enough that we kept our coats on. He asked how I was doing, and I gave him the truthful answer: better in some ways, lonelier in others, not yet sure what those added up to.
"I used to think you could fix anything if you found the right sequence," he said.
"I still think that about a lot of things."
"I know. But love isn't a machine."
I smiled. "You're starting to sound like a greeting card."
"Nina says I have range."
Then his expression grew serious. "I hope you're not deciding that because Rachel hurt you, everybody who loves you will eventually make you pay for it."
"I'm trying not to."
"Good. You were good to her. She was good to you in some ways. And some things still couldn't be repaired. You can live with all three facts."
I looked through the balcony doors at Nina helping the toddler recover from the collapse of his tower. Their marriage wasn't perfect. I'd seen them disagree, get annoyed, and make awkward apologies. What I hadn't seen was either of them using the relationship itself as a threat. That distinction suddenly seemed both small and enormous.
By Thanksgiving, Leah and I had found a routine. We spoke every Sunday evening. Sometimes our conversations were long and personal; sometimes we discussed school schedules, Dad's medical appointments, or the fact that Andrew had finally repaired the porch step that had been loose for a year. I visited when I could, without pretending I had the resources to become a second full-time caregiver.