She was talking about his time in Lark, of course, the days and days he’d spent closely with another woman. Randie’s name had come up only once during their counseling sessions. Still, she sat at the edge of his consciousness, a watery light in the distance, a beacon of him at his best self, and Lisa knew him well enough to understand some new thing had a hold on him, had taken up residence in an ill-lit corner of his heart, a place where perhaps she, his wife, had never been welcomed. She’d never accused Darren of laying a hand on Randie but, more cruelly, of him being unsatisfied with a wife who didn’t need him the way the widow had. It irritated him to hear Randie reduced to the widow, but he knew instinctively it would be unwise to say so. His job in that suffocatingly warm therapist’s office was to listen. He never told her that Randie had invited him to be with her when she buried her husband’s ashes in Tyler. Or that just a few weeks ago, Randie had sent a postcard to his office, a picture of the arch at the Freedman’s Memorial Cemetery in Dallas, where, despite her professed distaste for all things Texan, she’d taken a job for a start-up fashion label. She’d be in the state for another week, she’d written in an artful script. Nor did he tell his wife he’d actually thought of driving up to Dallas to see Randie, just to know if she was doing okay. He kept it all to himself. It was, all of it, better left alone. He’d never responded to Randie’s voice mail or the postcard, but guilt lingered, which was why he told Lisa now, against his better judgment, that it might be okay if she came to Jefferson for a night. “Dinner, maybe. But I can’t promise anything else.”

Lisa let out a throaty chuckle and said, “I can.”

It was playful flirting, and what man didn’t want his wife throwing herself at him? But Darren registered something pushy in it too, something slightly heartbreaking about the desperation in his wife’s willingness to drive four hours to hold him, as if she wasn’t sure their marriage could withstand a few days apart. She wanted now what she’d so casually tossed aside when she’d kicked him out of their home in the fall: the music of Darren’s breath at her back, his body pressed against hers in the dark of night. But even four sessions with Dr. Long had left him with a sharp pill of resentment he couldn’t quite swallow.