He sat heavily on the couch. The henley stretched across his shoulders; he looked older than forty-one in the lamp light. "No. Not the way you mean. Not sex. Not romance. But—" He stared at his hands. "We have been through hell together. Chris's funeral. Mara's. The social worker visits. Nights when Oliver wouldn't stop screaming and Ethan had a spelling test in the morning. There is a kind of closeness that isn't an affair and still isn't nothing. I have been grateful to her in ways that scared me. I have been lonely for you in ways that made gratitude feel dangerous. I never crossed a line. I thought about what a line would look like, which is its own kind of confession."
Laura sat in the armchair Chris had once occupied with his beer and his hypothetical will. The leather exhaled. Outside, somewhere down the block, a dog barked once and went silent.
"I came home thinking I would sleep in my own bed," she said. "I came home thinking grief was behind me for five minutes."
"I know."
"You don't. You know the version where you were the one holding everything together. I know the version where I abandoned my marriage to sit with a woman who forgot my name on alternate Tuesdays and still deserved every hour." Her eyes burned. "Both versions are true. That doesn't make this okay."
"It isn't okay," Daniel said. "I'm not asking you to call it okay tonight. I'm asking you not to leave."
She looked at the stairs. "Where am I supposed to sleep? Is the guest room hers?"
"Yes. Our room is still ours. Untouched. I changed the sheets this morning because I thought—I hoped—you'd be home."