We married at Blake’s grandparents’ farm in Penrose, North Carolina. Ida and Rush kept longhorn cattle and beef cattle, goats and sheep, pigs, horses and chickens. Their house loomed out of the fields like an exotic bird. Grandma Ida had apparently seen a picture of a Trinidadian house in a travel magazine and said that it was exactly the house she’d always dreamed of living in, so her husband built it for her – this grand, baby-blue Victorian anomaly with white Demerara shutters and fretwork. Everything in it was fitted out with pinewood and red cedar. There was no swimming pool but a large barrel-like thing that children and dogs jumped into in the summertime. I loved eating breakfasts in that kitchen with all those solid gleaming pans hanging from hooks above the stove. Grandma Ida whipping up fresh omelettes, Grandpa Rush fussing over the coffee maker. Blake’s parents Tom and Molly had moved there to help with the running of the farm, and Blake’s sister, Liane, who was seven years older, lived in the house too, with her husband Gus and their boys. The Hendersons all shared the same oblong jaw, and it was reassuring to look into their faces in the morning light, those immaculate bones moving up and down like mechanical toys. I felt I’d married into some kind of stability.

Senior year in college I told Blake we needed to take a break. ‘If we’re really going to get married we should sow some oats.’

‘But Grace,’ he said, ‘that’s mad. I don’t want anyone else.’

Two months later I heard a mousy blonde called Lorrie had attached herself to him in Chapel Hill. Misrak laughed when she told me. ‘Now you’re going to be all jealous when you’re the one who started this.’

Every Wednesday Misrak and I would go out, and while she was generally encouraging of random men dry-humping her on the dance floor I preferred to create a box of air around me.

‘Blake gets you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you’re pushing him away.’

I missed our weekends at the farm and I mistook this for longing. I had grown attached to Blake’s family, and in that year of our apartness I understood that when you give up on a person you must relinquish their family too. Molly finally called, ‘Why don’t you stop all this nonsense, honey, and go get him. If I have to make one more gluten-free meal for that girl I will lose it, I swear.’