I began cooking actual dinners again. For the first few weeks I'd eaten standing up, straight from containers, because setting one plate on a table meant acknowledging the other place was empty. Marcus invited me to his house one Sunday, where his children argued over which movie to watch and his wife quietly sent me home with leftovers. I watched them tease each other about the dishes and felt an ache I hadn't expected. It wasn't envy of their perfect life, because I knew they had struggles too. It was longing for the unremarkable intimacy of people who trusted the person beside them to remain on the same team.
I also went to see a counselor recommended by a colleague. I had resisted at first, telling myself I was practical and simply needed time. But I kept waking at three in the morning rehearsing conversations I would never have, and I had begun snapping at people for mistakes I'd normally handle patiently. The counselor asked what I wanted from those imaginary arguments. After a long silence I said I wanted Clare to acknowledge how much I had loved her while she was treating that love as something embarrassing.
"Does she need to acknowledge it for it to have been real?" the counselor asked.
That question irritated me. I went home intending to prove it was a ridiculous thing to ask. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had been allowing Clare's choices to rewrite the meaning of my own. I'd worked hard, kept promises, bought a cottage, and tried to support her. I had also been absent more evenings than I wanted to admit, had mistaken routine for closeness, and had failed to notice her changing long before she left. All those facts could be true without making her affair inevitable or justified.
Our tenth anniversary arrived on a Saturday. I had originally planned to drive Clare to Pine Lake that morning, blindfolded for the last mile. Instead I woke alone, made coffee, and sat in the kitchen reading messages from friends who remembered the date and didn't know whether to mention it. I left the phone facedown and went to the grocery store. I bought ingredients for a decent breakfast, a new notebook for work, and flowers for the table because I was tired of pretending beauty was something that existed only for couples.
That evening I took the white-ribboned keys from the drawer and set them beside my plate. I held them for a long time, thinking of the road north and the promise I'd made on our honeymoon. I didn't drive to the cottage. I wasn't ready to see the swing without her, and I decided that waiting wasn't failure. A house could be mine before I knew what to do with it. A life could be mine while I was still learning how to inhabit it alone.