Nia wiped her face. "I want to say: call me. Ruin my night. Trust me to be an adult in my own marriage. I can hold a default notice and a triumph at the same time. I am not made of glass."
"And to yourself?" Dr. Coles asked.
Nia hesitated. "I want to say: you were not foolish for believing him. You were loving him in the dialect you both spoke then. Learn a new dialect. Don't punish yourself for not knowing the old one was incomplete."
Marcus reached for her hand. She let him take it. Dr. Coles made a note and looked briefly, almost imperceptibly, satisfied.
There were still hard days. There were evenings when Nia opened a drawer looking for a whisk and found, instead, a utility bill from the old house that had hitchhiked in a box, and the sight of the familiar address knocked the wind out of her. There were mornings when Marcus woke from dreams in which he was still packing alone and the truck never came and Nia never landed. There were arguments about small things—the temperature of the thermostat, the frequency of visits to Atlanta, whether Amara could have a phone for emergencies when she turned seven—that carried the heat of the larger unfinished business. They got better at naming the heat. "This isn't about the thermostat," Nia would say, and Marcus would say, "I know," and sometimes they even meant it in the same way.
One Saturday, while Amara was at a birthday party two streets over, Nia found herself alone in the house with time and no agenda. She made coffee and walked from room to room the way she had on the last night in the old place, but this time the walking was inventory rather than farewell. In the hall closet she found Marcus's charcoal polo from moving day, washed and hung. In Amara's room she found a library book overdue by a week. On the console she found a thin layer of dust on the wedding photograph and wiped it with her sleeve.