Soon, too soon, Katie and Elliott were in the kitchen asking about the cookies. Stephen would help too, they decided. The four of us must have had fun that evening, because there was much laughter, even from me. I felt grateful that it should be ending like this, with pleasure. I wondered if they would miss me; yes, of course they would, that was stupid. But they would still have Stephen, who was too solid to go away, even if he found the place to go, and that was important. I was the one who had always been there for them, always available; but I think they felt closer to him. They would come to me with a problem, hoping I would be able to solve it; but they could talk to Stephen about how the problem made them feel, which was a much deeper thing. It didn’t matter.

Would Stephen miss me? Very likely more than the children. What damage would I do to him? He would be bewildered, wonder what he had done wrong, and I wished for a way to tell him that there was no wrong involved. But he would have to try to understand by himself; there was nothing I could explain.

I was laughing with them; we would have just one more evening together. The children went to bed early, and Stephen and I followed shortly after. It had been a good day, he said. It was good to come home to his family and see that it was all worthwhile. (I wondered if he thought he did it “all” for us.) I think when he said “family,” he was thinking more of the children, for he had had to make such an effort with me, the last couple of years had been hard for him, too; he handled me with such delicacy now, realizing that there was unhappiness, some fragility between us. He could hardly know that all that was gone now, that we were two people together and I was seeing him, not as an equal, for that implies a relationship, but almost as a stranger, a person who was in my life and whose presence I couldn’t properly explain. I knew there must have been closeness and caring, that there had been two of us, but now there was just one, and that was me. We were too tired to make love, or whatever I would have called it then.