It had been about a door.
And who got to come through it.
And who got to stay.
On a humid evening in the fourth summer, Daniel and Allison sat on the back steps again — their unofficial parliament — and talked about whether they would ever tell Margaret's church friends the full story of why she had left Cedar Ridge so abruptly. Gossip had done some of the work already. A woman from Margaret's old Bible study had asked, at a grocery store, whether there had been a falling-out with the facility. Margaret had said only that family arrangements had changed. Allison wanted to leave it there. Daniel wanted, for a moment, the cleansing burn of a full public accounting. Then he remembered how public accounting had felt in the foyer — the suitcase, the tear, the sentence aimed like a flare — and he let the desire go.
"We don't owe the grocery store our marriage," Allison said.