Once I had tried to reciprocate, to scratch his back. The second my fingers went to lift his shirt, however, he got up and left the room. I never tried again.

A husband stroking his wife’s neck while they cuddled on the love seat, on the other hand … Welcome to our little slice of normalcy.

“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked him casually. We’d watched some Harrison Ford movie that night, where the vengeful ghost of the husband’s first wife had wreaked havoc on the household.

“Maybe.”

“I don’t.”

His fingers tugged gently on my earlobe, firm, erotic pressure. I nestled closer to him, trying not to startle him, but having a harder and harder time sitting still. Who knew ears could be such an erogenous zone? But mine were, mine were.

“Why not?” he asked me, fingers moving from my earlobe, down the side of my neck, then back up again. A husband touching his wife. A wife snuggling with her husband. Normal. All perfectly normal.

So normal that some nights when I woke up alone in my marriage bed, my heart shattered into a thousand pieces. Yet I got up the next morning and did it all over again. Sometimes, I even heard my mother’s voice in my mind, “I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know….”

She was right, in the end. At the ripe old age of twenty-one, I was finally seeing all of life’s great truths: You can be in love and still feel incredibly lonely. You can have everything you ever wanted, only to realize that you wanted all the wrong things. You can have a husband as smart and sexy and compassionate as mine, and yet not really have him at all. And you can look at your own beautiful, precious daughter some days, and be genuinely jealous of how much he loves her, instead of you.

“Just don’t,” I said now. “Nobody wants to die, that’s all. So they make up pretty stories of an eternal afterlife, to take away the fear. If you think about it, however, it doesn’t make any sense. Without sadness, there can be no happiness, which means a state of eternal bliss really wouldn’t be that blissful. In fact, at a certain point, it would be mostly annoying. Nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.” I slid him a look. “You wouldn’t last a minute.”

He smiled, a lazy look on his dark features. He hadn’t shaved today. I liked the days he skipped the razor, his unkempt beard a nice compliment to his deep brown eyes and perpetually rumpled hair. I’d always appreciated the bad boy look.