Amy and Phil’s arguments about buying the house were sedate, but genuine. She always understood Phil gave in not because he loved the house, but because he loved her. His interest was remote at best, nonexistent at worst. If there was any work or renovation to be done to the house, it was her domain. He never said it, but she read it in his eyes: You wanted this house. You take care of it. And she did.

The day they moved in, they made love on the sunroom floor, a threadbare cotton blanket with a picture of the state of Georgia beneath them, while Molly and Jack napped in Pack ’N Plays in the foyer amid boxes blocking the way upstairs. Never once, in their eighteen years of living there, had Phil questioned why she claimed the best room in the house—why her dried flowers, torn photographs, trinkets, papers and books resided in the room with the best view of both the sunset and the side yard with its prolific rose garden and iron fence.

She now stood in the doorway and nibbled on her Band-Aid. When was the last time she and Phil had made love? She couldn’t think about it now. There were papers to grade.

When was the last time she and Nick had made love? She closed her eyes and remembered: the night before he left, in the musty third-floor apartment where he lived his senior year.

A Saxton University banner hung by a thumbtack on the left wall, a clap-activated lamp crouched on a discarded beer keg turned nightstand, next to the mattress on the floor. Why waste money on a bed frame or a real table when they could use the money for another camping trip to a national forest they hadn’t yet explored? The vague scent of soap mixed with toothpaste and a warm spot on the pillow attempted to seduce her to sleep even as she wanted to stay up all night, trace his face, his shoulder blades, the curve of his back. That night was to last three months. As it ended up, that night needed to last forever.

Our vows are still there, never broken.

She shook her head, shrugging off the memory. She walked to her desk, realigned her thoughts to the present, to the essays on the field trip. She sat down and leafed through the papers, then lifted and fingered the pink paper with the phone number that Phil had thrown away. She felt like an alcoholic digging a half-empty bottle from the trash, but told herself she would only use this number to ask Nick about the OWP project and the leaf he’d found.

Our vows are still there, never broken.

Enough about the damn vows, already.

She stuffed the paper in the top drawer of her desk, underneath old phone bills she’d meant to claim as teacher’s expenses.