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My husband standing at the kitchen counter after my mother’s funeral, making grilled cheese because I hadn’t eaten and he’d finally stopped asking whether I wanted anything and cooked one of the few things he how to make.

Paul knowing I hated making phone calls to service companies and taking care of them without announcing he’d done it, saving boxes in the basement because I always said we should keep a few and then complained when he kept too many.

It wasn’t romance, at least not the kind I had spent years accusing my life of lacking. It was maintenance, yes, but it was also presence, and I had made Paul’s steadiness smaller than it deserved to be, though that didn’t erase what he’d done.

But that morning, for the first time since waking up in 1984, maybe for the first time in years, I missed him.

Not Paul the father of Claire and Ben, although that grief was always there now, pulsing under everything, not the safe choice my parents had wanted for me, and not Paul as the man who’d stood between me and a different life.

My husband. The one who had hurt me, who had loved me quietly, and the one whose hand I could still remember when my daughter’s face was slipping away.

A knock sounded against the sliding glass door, and I nearly jumped out of the chair.

“Lorrie?” my mother called. “Are you awake?”

She opened the door to peer inside without waiting for an invitation, wearing a red raincoat and holding a folded red umbrella.

“You’re not even dressed.”

“It’s raining.”

“It’s almost nine.”

Her gaze moved over my face, and some of the briskness left her.

“Have you been crying again?”

I touched my cheek. Apparently I had.

“I’m fine.”

“You have got to stop saying that when you look like you’ve been personally betrayed by the universe.”

I stared at her.

“What?”

She frowned. “Too much?”

“No. It was actually very accurate.”

Bitsy came inside and set the umbrella near the door as she shook out her raincoat.

“I’m making omelettes.”

Her expression faltered.

“Paul called the house.”

I frowned. Why hadn’t he called my phone? “What did he want?”

“To see whether you were awake.”

“What did you say?”

“That you had not come over yet and that I was not your secretary.”

“Did he leave a message?”