“You see, I couldn’t do that—I couldn’t. You were sucking the life out of me, Eph. And the other part of it was…I wanted to hurt you. I did. I admit it. And that was the only way I knew I could.”

He exhaled deeply. She was finally admitting to something he’d always known. But there was no victory for him in that.

“I need Zack, you know that. Z is…he’s it. I think, without him, there would be no me. Unhealthy or not, that’s just the way it is. He’s everything to me…as you once were.” She paused to let that sink in, for both of them. “Without him, I would be lost, I would be…”

She gave up on her rambling.

Eph said, “You would be like me.”

That froze her. They stood there looking at each other.

“Look,” Eph said, “I’ll take some blame. For us, for you and me. I know I’m not the…the whatever, the easiest guy in the world, the ideal husband. I went through my thing. And Matt—I know I’ve said some things in the past…”

“You once called him my ‘consolation life.’”

Eph winced. “You know what? Maybe if I managed a Sears, if I had a job that was just that, a job, and not another marriage entirely…maybe you wouldn’t have felt so left out. So cheated. So…second place.”

They were quiet for a bit then, Eph realizing how bigger issues tended to crowd out the little ones. How true strife caused personal problems to be set aside with alacrity.

Kelly said, “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say we should have had this talk years ago.”

“We should have,” he agreed. “But we couldn’t. It wouldn’t have worked. We had to go through all this shit first. Believe me, I’d have paid any amount not to—not to have gone through one second of it—but here we are. Like old acquaintances.”

“Life doesn’t go at all the way you think it will.”

Eph nodded. “After what my parents went through, what they put me through, I always told myself, never, never, never, never.”

“I know.”

He folded in the spout on the milk carton. “So forget who did what. What we need to do now is make it up to him.”

“We do.”

Kelly nodded. Eph nodded. He swirled the milk around in the carton, feeling the coldness brush up against his palm.

“Christ, what a day,” he said. He thought again about the little girl in Freeburg, the one who had been holding hands with her mother on Flight 753. The one who was Zack’s age. “You know how you always told me, if something hit, some biological threat, that if I didn’t let you know first you’d divorce me? Well—too late for that.”