felt whenever I touched the white ribbon I'd tied around the ring. They represented years of deliberate saving and one secret I had kept because I believed surprising my wife would make her happier. The terrible thing about good surprises is that they are built on an assumption about the future: that the person you're planning for will still want to be there when the moment arrives.
We had spent our honeymoon at Pine Lake in a rented cottage about two hours north of the city. I can still picture the place: weathered blue shutters, a narrow driveway patched with gravel, a crooked dock extending into water so clear you could see the shadows of fish beneath it. The owner left us a handwritten note about the stubborn stove and a basket of apples from a farm nearby. There were no luxury amenities, just a little kitchen, a fireplace that smoked if you opened the damper too late, and an old porch swing that complained whenever two people sat on it together. Clare loved it before we'd even unloaded our bags.
We were young enough then to think the hard part of marriage was paying for the wedding. On our second evening, a storm moved across the lake and knocked the power out for three hours. We ate crackers and cheese by candlelight and laughed when I tried to make coffee on the wood stove. Later, after the rain stopped, Clare curled up on the swing with her feet in my lap while the boards beneath us dried in the night air. She said, almost casually, "Someday we're going to own a place like this. We'll grow old right here, complaining about the weather and watching other people's kids learn to swim."
"Other people's kids?" I asked, because back then we hadn't decided whether we'd have our own.
"Maybe ours, if life works out that way," she said. "But even if it doesn't, I want the porch. I want the quiet. I want us to have someplace where nobody is asking us to be anything except ourselves."
I promised her we would find it someday. I didn't say the kind of promise people make to end a romantic conversation; I meant it in the practical way I mean almost everything. If a dream had a price and I could calculate a path toward it, I'd start walking that path. We came home, returned to our jobs, paid off wedding expenses, and watched years of ordinary responsibilities stack up around that promise. But every time I drove north for a landscaping job or saw a picture of still water at dawn, I remembered her feet resting in my lap.
The first years were not all disappointment. There were Sunday breakfasts when Clare danced in socks on the kitchen floor, winter evenings when we watched terrible movies and made fun of the dialogue, and a period when she helped me design the first decent logo for my business. She was