Elise listened with her arms around her knees on the sofa. "When you shook in the car — did you think of calling me?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't."
"I called my voicemail box and hung up. Which is a pathetic sentence to say out loud."
"It is," Elise agreed. "Keep going."
They talked until the fire became coals. They talked about money — eleven thousand dollars itemized across months, Daniel fetching his banking app and showing her each withdrawal while she wrote dates on the back of a receipt. They talked about whether Daniel's parents deserved the full truth about Greg or only Natalie's letter. Elise argued for enough truth to protect the parents from Greg's narrative; Daniel worried about his mother's health. They did not finish the argument. They parked it, deliberately, like adults learning a new traffic pattern.
On the fifth day, Elise woke angry again without a fresh cause. Anger, she discovered, had aftershocks. She was short with Daniel about the dishwasher. She corrected Toby too sharply for tracking snow onto the mat. Then she apologized to Toby, then went for a walk alone down the road until her lungs burned, then came back and told Daniel, "I am not leaving you. I am also not finished bleeding. Both things are true. If you try to accelerate my forgiveness because you are uncomfortable, I will slow down on purpose."
"Understood," Daniel said. He looked, for a moment, younger than forty-three, like the man who had proposed in the rain and thought love was a architecture problem with a correct solution.