“What happened?”
He stepped into the room and turned the frame face down.
“My mother,” he said, “finally got the kind of woman she thought fit the family. Caroline liked the house, the last name, and one of my closest friends more than she liked me. They live in Manhattan now. I wish them both chronic inconvenience.”
The dryness of it caught Hannah off guard. A startled laugh escaped before she could stop it.
For one dangerous second, they looked at each other like the old version of them still existed somewhere under the wreckage.
Then she remembered herself.
“I should go check on the twins.”
“Hannah.”
She paused.
“Thank you for laughing,” he said.
She didn’t answer. But she thought about it for hours.
The first real crack came on a Thursday night.
A storm rolled in off the lake, rattling the windows. Noah and Ellie had finally gone down after a brutal stretch of crying. Hannah was halfway asleep when she heard a sound from somewhere else in the house.
A man’s voice.
Not speaking. Breaking.
She followed it barefoot to Ethan’s room.
The door stood slightly open. Through the gap she saw him sitting on the floor beside the bed, still in dress pants and a wrinkled white shirt, tie gone, one forearm braced over his eyes. A whiskey glass sat untouched on the nightstand.
He wasn’t drunk.
He was trying and failing to stay composed.
“Ethan?”
His head jerked up. The rawness on his face made him look younger and wrecked at the same time.
“Sorry,” he said. “I woke you.”
“What happened?”
He laughed once with no humor in it. “Nightmares. Turns out the subconscious is a vindictive little bastard.”
She should have left. She knew it.
Instead she walked in and sat on the edge of the chair by the window, close enough to be human, far enough to keep dignity between them.
After a long moment, he said, “Every night since the surgery, I dream I’m too late.”
Her throat tightened.
“I dream they wheel you in,” he continued, staring at the floor. “Only I can’t get to the OR. The hallways keep changing. Or I’m operating and the monitors flatline. Or you wake up and look at me the way you did that first morning and I know I deserve it, but I still can’t stand it.”
The confession sat between them.
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