That evening, she found me standing in front of the framed wedding photograph in the hallway. It showed Natalie in an ivory dress with a lace collar, me in a suit that didn't quite fit, and both of us laughing at something the photographer had said. Behind us stood a cluster of family members, some now dead, some living in other states, their faces preserved in a happiness that belonged to another time. Ryan was just visible near the edge of the frame, smiling in his best man's suit. I had walked past the image every morning for nine years without looking closely at it. Now I couldn't look away.
“You don't have to take that down today,” Maya said.
“I know.”
“But you can.”
“I don't want to pretend it never happened.”
“Then don't. It happened. It mattered. You can honor that and still decide it ended.”
She left after dinner, but before she drove away she made me promise to take a shower and go to work on Monday. I told her I would try. She hugged me again and said that trying was enough for the moment. After her car disappeared, the house felt enormous. Yet I put away the dishes, turned off the lights, and managed six uninterrupted hours of sleep. It was the first small improvement, and it came without Natalie doing anything at all.
Monday morning, day four, Natalie sent me a message at seven thirty-two. You could at least answer me. There were three missed calls from the previous night, all placed after midnight. I'd slept through them. I looked at the screen while standing outside a customer's house with a tape measure in my hand. The message irritated me more than I'd expected. For three days I had waited for an indication that she understood what she'd done, and when communication finally came, it arrived as a complaint about my availability.
I placed the phone in my pocket and walked through the front door of the house we were renovating. Mrs. Evelyn Price, our customer, was seventy-four, a retired school librarian who had hired Oak & Stone to convert her downstairs bathroom into a safer space after knee surgery. She greeted me in slippers and offered coffee from an ancient percolator. Evelyn had lived alone since her husband died five years earlier, and she spoke about him with an ease I found almost unbearable. He'd had a terrible habit of leaving cabinet doors open, she told me. She still occasionally found herself reaching to close one and feeling annoyed at a man who was no longer there to receive the complaint.
“You look like you have a storm following you around,” she said while I inspected the doorway.
“It's been a difficult week.”
“Do you want advice or quiet?”
“Quiet, probably.”
“Good. I've got plenty of that.”
We worked for an hour. Luis arrived with our apprentice, Tessa Green, and began measuring studs for the new shower. I went out to the truck to retrieve an extra level. When I returned, Evelyn was sitting at her table looking through a stack of photographs. She held up one of her husband, a young man in a bowling shirt, smiling so broadly he looked embarrassed by his own happiness.
“We had some ugly years,” she said. “I don't talk about those much.”