good at marketing, better than she sometimes allowed herself to believe. When a storm destroyed the storage shed behind our first rental house, she helped me drag ruined equipment into the driveway without once complaining about the mud. When she got promoted at the dental-office group, I took her out to dinner and told everyone who asked how hard she'd worked for it.
There were losses too. We tried for a baby for a while, quietly enough that most people didn't know, and after a string of disappointing appointments we agreed to stop turning every month into another measurement of failure. We did not become parents. For a time we made our peace with that and found pleasure in nieces, nephews, friends' children, and the freedom to travel on a whim when my schedule allowed it. I thought the dream of the cottage survived partly because it did not depend on anybody else's timetable. It was one thing we could still promise each other without having to hope the world would cooperate.
My grandfather died six years before Clare left. He was a retired mechanic who fixed appliances that most people would have thrown away, and who could tell whether a motor was going bad by listening to it for half a minute. He wasn't outwardly affectionate, but he showed up when your truck wouldn't start and stayed until it did. He left me a little over two hundred thousand dollars, which astonished me because I'd never seen him spend more than necessary on himself. His will was plain, the money was transferred to an account in my name, and I kept it separate from everything Clare and I used to run our household.
That decision had nothing to do with doubting her. Grandpa used to say money inherited from someone who worked his whole life for it deserved a little patience before it was spent, and I believed him. Clare knew about the inheritance, although we rarely discussed the exact amount. When it first arrived, she suggested a bigger house or a long vacation, and I said I wanted to wait until we found something that mattered more than a temporary improvement. She laughed and called me the only man she knew who could inherit a fortune and continue buying work gloves in bulk.
In the years that followed, I sometimes drove up to Pine Lake alone after visiting suppliers north of town. I'd take a sandwich to a public picnic table and look at listings on my phone. Most were out of reach, or needed repairs too costly to make sense, or had beautiful photographs that concealed roads you could barely drive down. I never mentioned the searches to Clare because I wanted the final result to be a surprise. Looking back, I understand there is irony in criticizing someone else's secrecy while explaining my own, but mine was meant to create a shared future, not to arrange a separate one. The distinction mattered to me, although I would eventually learn that good intentions don't make every silence wise.