"You didn't go to bed," he said.
"No."
He went to the counter and started the coffee maker, because that was what he did every morning, because his hands needed a task as much as hers had. They listened to it gurgle. When it was done he poured two cups and brought one to her and set it in front of her and then sat down across the table, which he had not done, she realized, in a long time. They usually ate standing up, or in the car, or at the island with Emma between them talking about orchestra.
"I want to say some things," he said. "And I need you to let me get through them."
"Okay."
He wrapped both hands around his mug. Adam was a structural engineer. He designed parking garages and hospital wings, and he had once explained to her, on their second date, at a bad Italian restaurant on College Avenue in Fort Collins, that the most dangerous failures in a building were never the dramatic ones. It was not the earthquake, he had said. It was the hairline crack in a load-bearing wall that nobody noticed for twenty years, while the whole weight of the structure kept pressing down on it, a little more every day.