As I had headed home, I had imagined that the woman had texted “Lotti,” and he’d called a car to go see her. He’d been staying at a hotel, so maybe he was an old flame from college, in town for business. Or a traveler she’d met in a bar earlier that night.

Whatever their relationship, that interaction—the expression on her face, the rigidness of his body as he stared up at her in the rain—had told me everything I needed to know about them. They were normal, and sexy, and infatuated with each other.

They were Keith and me—before the medications, the fear, the whiskey, the guilt, the sleepless nights.

They were us, before.

• • •

As I stood naked in the bathroom, I tried to get the couple out of my mind. I did that often, making up stories about my passengers as I dropped them off. It seemed to make the monotony of pick-up, drop-off, pick-up, drop-off more bearable.

But there was something about this couple that I couldn’t shake. Maybe it was Lotti’s flirtatious smile before he got out of my car; maybe it was the expression on the woman’s face.

Maybe I was just tired.

I dropped my hands away my face and stepped out into the living room, a towel wrapped around my body.

When Keith and I had first moved in three years ago, we’d been concerned about the size of the small home and the fact that there was only one bathroom.

What happens when we have visitors?

Maybe it’s too much of an inconvenience.

Maybe we should hold out for a place with one and a half bathrooms.

Maybe Keith will get into a car accident exactly six days after our thirteenth wedding anniversary, and the pain medications will make him so sick that he’ll need a bathroom close by at all times.

We never imagined that last one.

Aside from the size, Keith and I had grown to love the place. The house had been an investment of a lifetime—small, simple, and worth every single penny of the savings we’d put into it. We’d both dreamed of owning our own home our entire lives, a fact we learned about each other very early on in our relationship.

“My parents are both social workers,” he’d told me on our second date as we ate dinner in a small restaurant in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood. “They found their calling in each other and in missionary work, which means I lived in nine apartments on three continents by the time I went to college. Don’t get me wrong—my parents are the kindest people I’ve ever met and probably ever will meet, and I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything. I just think I’ve always craved a little stability in terms of the place I call home.”