Wendell gradually resigned himself to a similar conclusion. It wasn’t so much that he gave up on the idea of one day loving Nadine. It was as though love had given up on him. While they shared quarters, while they slept in the same bed, they were strangers to one another. They both went off to work in the morning and both came home at night. They each had their assigned duties and stuck to them.

It was a life.

Nadine kept herself busy most evenings. If it wasn’t book club, it was a lecture series, or a Thai cooking class. Wendell would plunk himself in front of the television, eating microwaved popcorn, picking something from his library of VHS tapes, like Ghostbusters or Jurassic Park or the two Batman movies starring Michael Keaton. Movies Nadine had no appreciation for, movies she thought were, basically, stupid.

He was, he believed, living with a low-level depression, although he had not been clinically diagnosed. And he was pretty sure Nadine was, too.

Then came the trains. And the strangest, most wonderful thing happened.

Wendell had expected her to be, if not flat-out annoyed by his newfound interest, at the very least dismissive. You’re a grown man, he’d figured she would say. Am I married to a child?

But she turned out to be interested.

She eyed him curiously the night he took his new purchases to the basement. She perched herself on the top of the stairs, out of sight, watching what he was up to. The second night, she came all the way down, pulled up a chair as he set about nailing track down to the table.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t know whether I’ve ever told you this, but I had a dollhouse when I was little.”

“Did you?”

She nodded at the recollection.

“I loved it. Two stories, with gingerbread trim. A kitchen and living and dining rooms downstairs, two bedrooms, and a bathroom upstairs, and a staircase. I must have spent a million hours imagining I lived inside it, and now I don’t even know what happened to it. Sometime in my teens, long after I’d stopped playing with it, my mother must have gotten rid of it. It wasn’t like some pink Barbie house. It looked so real, and the furniture was the most exquisitely detailed stuff. Armoires and love seats and carpets and a little chandelier that hung over the dining room table. It had everything.”

“That sounds like so much fun,” her husband said.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, went up to the kitchen, and returned minutes later with a plate of saltine crackers and slices of Cracker Barrel cheddar. While they were having their snack, Nadine offered to assemble one of the building kits.

Wendell was hesitant at first. “It’s okay,” Nadine said. “You want to do it yourself.”