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I blew my nose and tried to laugh, which only made him look more worried.

“Do you want me to call Claire? Ben? A doctor? Possibly all three, though Ben will be useless unless the emergency involves takeout.”

“No doctor.” My voice sounded wrecked. “No children.”

“Good,” he said quietly. “I was running out of people.”

That got a real laugh out of me, wet and unsteady, and I touched his face with one hand before I could overthink it. His skin was warm from the shower, faintly rough where he needed to shave, and so dear to me in that moment I could hardly breathe.

“You’re here,” I said.

His brow furrowed. “I just got out of the shower.”

For years, I had made an entire language out of not saying things. I’m fine. It doesn’t matter. I’m tired. Not now. Maybe later. Paul had respected all of those closed doors, and I had resented him for not forcing them open, which was not especially fair, but marriage contained a surprising number of unfair things people pretended were normal because the dishwasher needed unloading.

“I don’t want to go upstairs yet,” I said. “I want you to sit with me.”

The request seemed to move through him slowly. He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and for a while neither of us spoke. The house settled around us, the refrigerator clicked on in the kitchen, and a car passed outside, headlights sliding across the wall before disappearing.

Paul looked down at the cassette in my lap. “I didn’t know you still had that.”

“Neither did I.”

“Dean’s handwriting?”

I looked at him because of course he knew. Not everything, not the whole time travel part, but enough. Paul had been there in 1984, had seen Dean at the edge of that room, had married me afterward and lived with whatever shadows marriage carried in from the beginning.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded once, and if there was jealousy in the gesture, it had aged into something quieter and less useful.

“I used to wonder about him,” he said after a minute, rubbing his thumb over the stiff knuckle on his right hand.

“Not every day, because that would’ve been weird, but more in the early years.”

“I wondered too.”

The words came out plain and honest. Paul only looked down at our hands, close together but not touching, and when I said I was sorry, not for wondering but for turning all that wondering into distance, he nodded as if he’d been carrying his half of that sentence around for a long time.

“I thought if you wanted to talk, you would,” he said.

“And I thought if you wanted to know, you’d ask.”

A small, tired smile crossed his face. “That was inefficient of us.”

I laughed, and so did he, softly and sadly, and then I took his hand. His fingers closed around mine carefully at first, then with more certainty, his wedding ring pressing against my palm.

“I don’t want to be quiet anymore,” I said, leaning into the words before I could tidy them up.

“About us, I mean. About the things we never said because they were easier not to say. About what I wanted and didn’t ask for, and what you wanted and didn’t ask for, and all the doors we left closed until the house got drafty.”

Paul’s mouth moved. “The house got drafty?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” He looked toward the dark kitchen, then back at me. “It may take me some practice.”

“Good. You like practice.”