She looked into his eyes. Somewhere, she heard a sonata playing. She smiled, and kissed him again. She loved the heat of his hands, the protrusion of his ears, the curve of his smile; loved that he would think to take her out for supper and not insist that they go back to the bungalow right away. Perhaps they really could forge a new path, separate from the ruts they had worn in their lives over the past few months. Maybe Pine Rapids wouldn’t be so bad. Even if she was going to stay married, that didn’t mean she had to care what the town thought of her. Let them talk! Starting with tonight, when they would comment on how shocking it was that her husband had had to take her out for supper on a Tuesday. She could hear them now: “I bet she was reading a novel all day, instead of fulfilling her obligation to the household! She’s just spoiled, expects dinner out like it was her due! Why, even Wilma Mickelson always had dinner on the table for John.”

Dolly took a deep breath. “Yes, let’s go,” she said. When they stood, she linked her arm with his.

As they walked out into the evening and she pulled the Mickelsons’ front door shut behind them, she felt a little pinch around her heart. It wasn’t easy, leaving the poor house behind, and with it her fanciful notions of the spectacular life she would have had living there—with Byron or without him. But she loved Byron, and even if marriage wasn’t the perpetual honeymoon she’d imagined it would be, she was still determined to make it work.

In fact, walking out of the house with Byron felt good, like a new start. She was older and wiser, setting out this time, and she had made up her mind. She would not again neglect to consider her own desires, her own evolving dreams of what her life could be. To remind herself, she would visit the Mickelson house from time to time. Not for JJ, and not for Byron, but because she’d sensed within its walls the joys and costs, the possibilities and devastations, of living, and she didn’t ever want to lose that part of her that she had found there.