"Tell me about the nights," she said finally. "The ones after Amara went to sleep. What did you do?"
Marcus let his head tip back against the wall. "I sat at the kitchen table with the spreadsheet. I called old coworkers who didn't pick up. I walked through the house and tried to memorize it like I was already gone. Sometimes I stood in Amara's doorway and watched her sleep and hated myself for the kind of father who lets a house become a secret. Sometimes I almost dialed you. I wrote texts I deleted. Once I called Simone at eleven because the bank portal crashed and I thought the short sale had fallen through. She walked me through it on the phone while her own kid slept. That was the night I gave her the garage opener. It felt like handing someone a piece of my failure and asking them to carry it carefully."
"Did you ever," Nia asked, and hated herself for needing the question, "want her?"
Marcus turned his face toward her. In the dim hallway his eyes looked older than thirty-eight. "No. Not once. I wanted you home. I wanted the version of me that still had a job and a plan you were part of. Simone became the person who knew the truth because I wouldn't let you be that person. That doesn't make her a romantic substitute. It makes her a witness I hired and then leaned on too hard."
Nia believed him. The belief did not arrive like relief. It arrived like a bruise she could finally see the edges of. An affair would have been a cleaner villain. An affair would have given her rage a simple address. This—this protective deceit dressed as love—asked her to hold two opposing truths at once: that he had tried to save her, and that he had stolen her agency to do it.
She stood, knees stiff from the floor and the flight and the day. "We're going back to the other house," she said. "I need to sleep in our bed one more night. Or not sleep. But I need to be there while it's still ours."