For a second I considered cooking something else.
Then I laughed at myself.
It was pasta.
I was not going to surrender pasta to a memory.
I put water on to boil.
Opened a bottle of wine.
One glass this time.
The wind had picked up outside, moving the flag beside the mailbox and scraping the maple against the siding.
At seven-thirty my phone buzzed.
A message from Laura.
You home?
Yes.
Good.
That was all.
I should have known.
Twenty minutes later came three knocks on the front door.
Knock.
I stopped stirring the sauce.
Knock.
For one strange second my body remembered before my mind did. My chest tightened. I saw Vanessa in the red dress, eyes widening as Adrian stood outside with the folder.
Then the third knock came.
Knock.
I wiped my hands and opened the door.
Laura stood on the porch holding Ellie’s car seat in one hand and a bakery box in the other.
“You own a doorbell,” I said.
“It sounds stupid.”
“You drove here to insult my doorbell?”
“I drove here because Mom said today might be weird for you and then made me promise not to tell you she said that.”
“You lasted seven seconds.”
“I’m sleep-deprived.”
Ellie began making a small unhappy noise inside the carrier.
Laura thrust the bakery box toward me.
“Move. I brought cannoli.”
I stepped aside.
She entered the house as if she still lived there, carried the baby to the kitchen, and immediately criticized my pasta sauce.
“You need more garlic.”
“It has garlic.”
“It needs more.”
“You say that about everything.”
“It’s usually true.”
I added more garlic.
We ate at the same table where my wedding ring and the envelope had sat one year earlier.
Ellie slept in a carrier between us. Laura talked about daycare waiting lists, her husband’s inability to fold infant clothes correctly, and our mother’s conviction that every cry meant the baby was cold.
At some point I realized the anniversary had stopped feeling like an anniversary.
It was simply Friday.
After Laura left, I washed the dishes and stood for a moment in the kitchen.
The house was quiet again.
I thought of the three knocks.
For a long time I had believed they were the sound of my marriage ending.
They were not.
The marriage had been ending in smaller sounds long before that.
A deleted call at 1:18 in the morning.
A bank notification ignored.
A question turned into an accusation.