Have you been out with anyone since Kate?

I’d recently stepped into the dating world again. Dating in my late forties was even worse than it was in my twenties, and I didn’t like it then.

His response was immediate.

Absolutely not.

Kate had been missing for over four years, so I assumed he’d been on at least a few awful dates and that we could swap stories. There were two types of people in group—those who didn’t like to speak about their lost loved ones and kept their memories close to them, like carefully guarded secrets, and those who couldn’t stop talking about them. Scott fell into the latter category, and he shared so many stories about Kate that I felt like I knew her personally. I knew more about her than I did about some of my closest friends.

Have you thought about it?

His response wasn’t so quick that time. I felt the weight of his guilt while he typed.

A couple times . . .

Over the next few months, Scott opened up more and more about the difficulties he had with moving on. I reassured him that it was okay again and again, gently nudging him in the direction of letting go. He was so young, too young to spend the rest of his life alone. Then one night I just finally came out and said it.

Maybe it would help you let Kate go if you had her declared dead.

It had been another two years before he had. Another year before our first date.

And now here we were.

Newlyweds.

It’d been ten months since we’d made it official down at the courthouse, with our children as our witnesses—my two boys, Thad and Caleb, and Abbi. Both of us had already done it the traditional way and hadn’t wanted to do it that way again. Besides, those spots were reserved for our lost spouses. We respected each other’s memories in that way. Instead of a big reception, we had gone out to dinner to celebrate, but it hadn’t been all that different from our monthly family dinners. Blending our families had always been important to us. It was why we moved in together long before we got married. We weren’t fools. We knew it might not work out, and both of us were willing to walk away from our relationship if it didn’t work with our children. They’d been through too much already.

The transition with Thad and Caleb went smoothly. Thad only had the summer before he left for college, and Caleb was starting his sophomore year at Drake, so they were too busy getting started with their own lives to care that much about our relationship. Abbi was a different story. She was almost thirteen when Scott and I started living together and had never shared her dad with anyone. She only knew a life with her and Scott, and she wasn’t so willing to let it go. My boys were the ones who broke her down, because they adored her and doted on her constantly. It didn’t take long for her to return the feelings. They had never missed a violin recital when they were home from college, and all her friends had swooned over them.