Nia took a cup. "Good morning."
They worked. There is a particular intimacy to packing a shared life that no marriage manual adequately warns about. Who wraps the glasses. Who decides whether the cracked platter stays. Who finds, at the back of a drawer, a ticket stub from a concert neither person remembers clearly enough to claim. Nia and Marcus moved around each other with the choreography of long partnership and the bruise of new distrust. Simone stayed mostly in the garage and the kitchen, efficient, labeling, never entering the master bedroom without asking.
At ten, Nia asked Marcus to take Amara for a walk to the park at the end of the block. "I need that conversation," she said.
Marcus looked at Simone, then at Nia, then nodded. He helped Amara into her sneakers—the same sneakers that had been lying by the stairs yesterday evening like evidence of a childhood still in progress—and they went out into the sunlight.
The house quieted. Simone wiped her hands on a towel and waited.
Nia leaned against the kitchen island. "I disliked you on sight," she said. "I want that said plainly. You walked into my house with boxes and my daughter's affection and my husband's secrecy, and my mind did what minds do. It wrote you into the oldest story available."