Besides, he sort of liked doing the cooking. It gave him something to think about besides work and how badly he missed his wife. It also meant he’d eat a more complete meal. For the past three years, he’d subsisted mostly on what he could find rooting around in the pantry or fridge—hummus and vegetables, crackers and cheese, cold cereal, bread and peanut butter—or what he could order from a restaurant. He missed the meals he and Shiloh used to prepare together, the recipes they’d used, the conversation and togetherness.

“Hope you’re hungry,” he said.

“Wow. You went to a lot of work,” she responded.

With the spatula he’d used to dish up the potatoes, he gestured at her chair, an unspoken invitation to take the seat next to the wall, where her damaged cheek would be turned away from him. He hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of her entire face yet—she had her head bowed and her hair was falling forward—but he hoped she’d left her bandages at home. As far as he was concerned, they’d already cleared that hurdle; he didn’t want to backtrack. “The best thing on the table is the juice,” he said as he returned the pan to the stove and divested himself of the oven mitt he’d used to carry it. “Give it a try.”

A chair scraped the floor, and she sat down as he searched the fridge for some ketchup.

“You’re right,” she said after a moment. “It’s delicious.”

“Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that make all the difference.”

“If you say so,” she grumbled, and he chuckled at her response. He knew at this point what she was going through: nothing seemed as though it would help.

Once he joined her at the table, he still couldn’t see her face full on, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing any bandages. He considered that a step in the right direction. She had to accept herself as she was. In his opinion, that would be her first step out of this thing. “You sleep good?”

“Not too good. You?”

It was hard not to crane his neck to take another look at her damaged cheek. He hoped he was remembering those scars as worse than they were. But she was being careful to keep her face averted, so knowing how important it was to ease into this encounter, he reached for his glass. “Sleeping has always been difficult for me, which is why I typically work at night.”

“Why do you have trouble sleeping?”

He took a drink of juice and set his glass down. “I don’t know. Neither do the doctors. They’ve given me plenty of sedatives through the years, though.”

“The pills don’t work?”