When we stopped for lunch, Tessa asked whether I had told Julian not to contact me. I said yes, although he'd tried again with a message about a song he heard in a restaurant. This time I had not answered. Tessa said she was glad. Then she surprised me by asking what I wanted my life to look like even if Nolan did not come back. I began to speak about our house, the anniversary trips we would miss, and the children we might never have. She shook her head gently. "Those are things you might lose," she said. "What do you want to become?" I didn't know. For eight years I had said we whenever someone asked about my future. Now I had to answer in the singular, and I didn't like the emptiness of the page.
Near the end of August, Nolan agreed to meet me at a public park for an hour. He said he had questions about our mortgage and insurance that would be easier to discuss face-to-face. I arrived early with a folder of statements and a list of possible ways to refinance the house. We sat at a picnic table beneath a broad tree while children rode bicycles on the path nearby. There was no music, no family audience, and no one recording us. It was the first time I had been grateful for ordinary anonymity since the cookout.
He looked thinner, and the tan on his arms had faded. He wore a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and had brought a notebook, not a duffel bag. I wanted to reach across the table and ask whether he was eating enough, whether he slept well, whether he had found the good coffee place near his apartment. I wanted to ask what his curtains looked like. Instead I took out our mortgage statements, and for the first twenty minutes we discussed numbers: what we owed, what the house might sell for, whether either of us could carry the payments alone, and how to divide the repair expenses we had already paid.
Nolan suggested an independent valuation before either of us made plans. I agreed. Then he closed his notebook. "I read your letter," he said. My mouth went dry. He told me he appreciated the honesty about Julian, but he wanted to know one thing that the letter had not answered. "Were you hoping I'd see you kiss him?" he asked. I stared at him, hearing the music from the backyard as clearly as if someone had turned it on beside us.
I could have lied. I had a polished version ready: I hadn't thought about him at all. But that wasn't true. "Part of me did," I admitted. "I wanted a reaction." Nolan looked down at his hands. I rushed to explain that I had felt invisible, that