The hardest part was watching Nicole go dead to him. She did her grieving behind closed doors. Always had. So there had been no fights. No tears. Just a numb distance. She reached her conclusion about the marriage before she even confronted him. Everything else was a formality.

He begged for another chance, but Nicole wasn’t the forgiving kind. They’d known each other since high school, and he’d never once known Nicole to bend. She gave no second chances when it came to loyalty. You were loyal or you weren’t; it wasn’t something you learned. If he wasn’t a man she could trust, he wasn’t a man she could be married to. Gibson had always loved the confidence she had in her own counsel, but it was another thing entirely being on the wrong side of it.

And just like that, he was a single, divorced father living in a bland high-rise concrete-slab apartment. Gone were six years of marriage. And in its place he had alimony payments, an hour commute to see his daughter, and a deepening suspicion that he was the dumbest son of a bitch who’d ever lived.

That was why the house mattered.

It was a good house—a sturdy, two-story Cape Cod. Far out from DC—quiet and safe. Good schools. One July, on furlough, he’d planted the row of azaleas that ran alongside the driveway. Afterward, he and Nicole sat in deck chairs, drinking beers and planning the garden until the bugs chased them inside. Ellie followed nine months later. That was the happiest Gibson had ever been, and he didn’t regret buying the house, even now. Even if it was killing him trying to hold on to it. The house represented the life that he owed Nicole and Ellie. He’d rather die than see them lose it because of him.

The soccer game was just getting started as he walked up. The ball bounced toward the sideline, and a pack of girls from both teams chased after it, shrieking happily. He spotted Ellie immediately. She was on the far side of the field, bent over and staring intently at something in the grass. Gibson grinned. It was just possible that his daughter was the least talented soccer player in the history of the world. It wasn’t only her utter lack of coordination and inability to judge the flight of the ball. It was her flagrant utter disregard for the rules of the game. The idea of playing a single position bored her, and she roamed the field with impunity. Without the uniform, it would have been hard to tell which team she was on.

Out on the field, Ellie began running in a tight circle with her arms out, looking up at the sky until she got dizzy and fell over in a heap.