Some details bothered me even then. Minerva drove the older Honda CR-V I had paid off two years earlier because her own car had developed transmission trouble and she didn't want to repair it. I kept my smaller sedan for work, and we referred to the Honda as the car she used, not the car she owned. She had a spare key, of course. I had given it to her when she started borrowing the vehicle, never imagining it might become relevant in a police report.
She had also begun treating my house as though my ownership of it was embarrassing. When friends visited, she called it our place, which was fine until she started telling me which furniture I needed to replace and which rooms should be repainted to match the life she pictured. She suggested selling my old desk because it looked cheap, even though I'd built it with my father the year before he died. She once invited a friend to stay for a long weekend without checking with me, then accused me of making her feel unwelcome when I asked where the guest would sleep.
None of that seemed enormous on its own. That was how the relationship survived: every problem was small enough to dismiss if you looked at it separately. A borrowed car. An unpaid utility bill.
A forgotten job application. A dinner canceled because something more exciting came up. I kept accepting each explanation because I loved the person I remembered from the beginning, and because admitting how different things had become would mean admitting how much of the past year I had spent explaining her away.
There were good moments, and I won't pretend otherwise. We went camping beside a lake one summer and watched thunderstorms roll over the water from inside a tent. She learned to make the chili my father used to cook and surprised me with it on his birthday. She sat through three hours of a documentary about electrical grids because I was interested and asked questions that proved she had been listening. People are rarely only one thing, and it would be easy to make this story simpler by pretending every pleasant memory was fake.
But by the Thursday of the engagement dinner, I was exhausted. At work, I was supporting a complicated software transition and regularly came home with the feeling that I had been carrying an invisible weight all day. At home, the bills kept arriving, and every attempt to talk about money became a discussion of whether I loved Minerva enough. She had begun spending evenings elsewhere, saying she needed to be around people who inspired her. I asked about it once and got a lecture about trust. I stopped asking because I wanted the evenings we did spend together to be peaceful.
Then she put Landon's ring in front of me.
"How long?" I asked.
She blinked. "How long what?"
"How long have you been seeing him?"