a bicycle crash, his dislike of damp socks, how he read restaurant menus backward, and the way he rubbed his neck in fear. He was doing that now. Love doesn’t vanish instantly when trust breaks; sometimes it remains but can no longer be used.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said.
“I believe you.”
“Can we talk about us?”
“No.”
“Not now?”
“Not ever in the way you mean.”
His face collapsed a little, and I hated that I still felt the impulse to console him. I kept gripping the doorframe. Sometimes a boundary begins as a physical act.
“Twenty-seven years, Claire.”
“I know exactly how many.”
“You can just walk away?”
I held his gaze. “You already did.”
He departed without another argument.
Six weeks afterward, mediation took place in a plain conference room. Melissa sat beside me; Daniel brought attorney Paul Whitman. A hallway machine dispensed
