Chapter 1

At our five-year anniversary table sat a little girl I had never seen before.

She climbed into my husband Nolan’s lap, wrapped her arms around his neck, and called him Daddy.

The woman beside her pulled out a napkin and wiped the juice from the girl’s mouth.

A blue wren was embroidered along the edge, with one stitch missing from its wing—the flaw my mother had left when her eyesight began to fail.

I stood outside the restaurant with the anniversary cake I had ordered for Nolan still in my hands.

Half an hour earlier, he had texted that a client dinner was running late and promised to make it up to me that weekend.

I still asked the baker next to my flower shop to box the cake. I wanted to surprise him at the restaurant he always went to.

The restaurant manager knew me. He waved when he saw me through the glass.

I didn’t go inside.

Nolan was cutting the little girl’s steak, moving the mushrooms onto his own plate.

She scrunched up her nose and said she hated pepper.

He laughed and coaxed her to take one more bite.

I had not seen that kind of easy warmth on his face in years.

For the last two, he had always been tired. Work was too much. My mother’s illness had drained us. The flower shop bills were piling up.

At dinner, he rarely put his phone down.

Tonight, his phone lay facedown on the table.

The woman leaned closer and said something I couldn’t hear.

Nolan reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear with a familiarity that made my stomach turn.

The little girl held up a crayon drawing.

Three people stood beneath a yellow sun: a man in a dark coat, a woman in a yellow dress, and a little girl holding both their hands.

“Daddy,” she asked, “can you stay tonight?”

Nolan’s smile faded. He looked at the woman with an expression I used to believe belonged only to me—guilt.

“Not tonight,” he said. “Ava is waiting for me.”

The woman did not look angry. She simply folded the blue wren napkin and set it beside her plate.

“She’ll understand,” she said. “You always say she will.”

The handle of the cake box cut into my palm.

There had been twelve of those napkins.

After my mother died, I locked them in the dining room sideboard. I had never even used them on holidays.

Nolan knew how much they meant to me. He could not have taken one by accident. And he could not have failed to tell that woman where it came from.

I did not walk into the restaurant.

The little girl was looking at Nolan with complete trust. She did not deserve to be the first person I hurt that night.

I took out my phone and photographed the table, the drawing, Nolan’s hand on the woman’s shoulder, and the blue wren napkin.

Then I handed the anniversary cake to the manager.

“Please get rid of it,” I said. “And cancel the table for two.”

I did not cry on the drive home.

I only thought about the napkins still in the sideboard and understood something I had not wanted to know.

The woman had not taken just one.