I leaned over Nate and wiped at a new stain on the arm of our dingy brown couch. “Ugh. When are we going to get rid of this thing?”

“No sense wasting money on a new one,” Nate replied cheerfully.

The seams were tattered, the fabric stained, but I was wasting my breath. Nate had bought the couch before we met and was strangely attached to it. He preferred easy and comfortable over new and nice. And he was right: we couldn’t afford a new one. Everything we owned was a little threadbare, a little shabby and overused.

You’d think we’d be doing well financially. Nate earned a respectable government salary as a detective, and I was a doctor. I certainly thought I’d be doing better by now. But becoming a doctor wasn’t exactly cheap. Thank God we were able to rent our house from Nate’s mother. We couldn’t afford anything else.

Nate folded me in his arms, and I laid my head against his chest. A blanket of warmth settled over me, loosening the knots in my shoulders. We didn’t have a fancy couch, but we had each other. That was what mattered.

Nate munched a snickerdoodle, his eyes on the TV, where a reporter was speaking about two Seattle policemen who’d fabricated evidence in order to win a murder conviction.

I waved at the TV. “Can you believe this?”

Nate shrugged. The washed-denim pools of his eyes were layered: sunny on the surface with dark, distant shadows underneath. “They wanted to make sure justice was served. I get it.”

I was a little surprised. I’d always thought of Nate as the upholder of all that was good and right in the world. He was one of the good guys.

But I guess even good guys have their limits.

“My mom told me about Mabel.” Nate’s eyes swept the planes of my face.

I froze. For a moment I wanted to tell him everything. To unload about the crush of patients, the child who’d vomited on my shoes, and then Mabel’s death after I’d unsuccessfully tried to manage her asthma attack with oral corticosteroids. I’d admitted her to the hospital but had received a call later from the ER. Mabel had died.

I knew Nate would be sweet and empathetic. He’d pour me a glass of wine, draw me a bath, and let me just relax. And he’d listen. But I couldn’t tell him about any of it.

Sometimes the intricate and complicated nature of belonging to a family still felt unfamiliar to me. I knew I should open up. Nate was a good man, the kind of man whose heart was a home, who put his family first and gave more than he took.

Yet I couldn’t get my feelings to move from my heart to my tongue.

“How’d she know?” I asked.