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Another appears before I finish reading.

People are seeing you walking around town with that thing. You’re making yourself look ridiculous.

My fingers tighten around the phone.

Then the third arrives.

You think any normal man is going to want you after this?

For a few seconds, the square seems to recede around me. People are still walking past. A truck turns through the intersection. Somewhere behind us, a child laughs. But Trent’s voice cuts through all of it, dragging the past right up against the present.

What will people think?

You embarrassed yourself.

You're lucky I put up with things other men wouldn't.

There was always an invisible audience in our marriage, a jury of reasonable people Trent could summon whenever he needed proof that I was the problem. If I disagreed with him, surely everyone else would agree with him instead.

I stare at the last message.

Once, it would have worked.

Maybe not completely. Maybe not forever. But enough to make me wonder whether he was right, whether people were laughing, whether I had made myself impossible to want.

Locke takes another lick of salted caramel beside me, and I turn toward him. Green leaves curl lightly above his collar. One hand holds the cone, and the other hangs near mine. He is strange and warm and funny and infuriatingly pleased with himself when he wins an argument. He kissed me this morning until I forgot what I’d decided to be cautious about.

You think any normal man is going to want you after this?

The question suddenly sounds pathetic.

I don’t want some imaginary future man Trent invented to keep me afraid. I want this one.

My phone buzzes again, but I lock the screen without reading it and put it back in my purse.

Locke waits until I look at him. “Do you want to go home?”

My first impulse says yes.

Home means locks. Cameras. Familiar walls. A place where I can disappear from everyone who saw us today and from whatever Trent thinks he’s entitled to know about it.

I look down at the melting edge of my ice cream.

“No.”

Locke waits.

“I want to finish this. And I want to keep walking.”

“Then we keep walking.”

He turns with me toward the other side of the square as though my answer is enough, and some of the tightness in my body eases. Trent’s name still knows how to find old reflexes. My muscles still remember what his displeasure used to require from me. But they are learning other things, too.

Locke finishes the last piece of his cone and looks at his empty hand. “Can I have another?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”