I walked to the bookshelf. Looked at the photo of them young and laughing. She was beautiful—dark hair, bright smile, the kind of face that made you want to know what she was thinking.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
Marcus looked up, surprised. “You want to hear about Sarah?”
“She was your wife for twenty-eight years. She’s part of you.” I turned to face him. “Unless that’s too hard.”
“No. It’s not too hard.” He brought me a glass of wine, then settled onto the couch, patting the spot beside him. “It’s just… no one’s asked. Since she died, people either avoid the topic entirelyor treat her like a tragedy. No one wants to hear the actual stories.”
“I want to hear them.”
So he told me.
He told me about their first date—dinner at a tiny Italian place in North Beach that didn’t take reservations. “We waited two hours for a table,” he said. “I was terrified. Two hours of conversation with a woman I barely knew, trying not to say something stupid.”
“Did you? Say something stupid?”
“I told her the history of mourning jewelry for forty-five minutes. Including the part about hair harvesting.” He winced at the memory. “She should have run.”
“But she didn’t.”
“She asked follow-up questions. Actual, interested follow-up questions. And then she told me about a mummy unwrapping party she’d read about—Victorians used to host them, apparently, as entertainment—and somewhere in the middle of discussing nineteenth-century death rituals over mediocre breadsticks, I realized I was going to marry her.”
“On the first date?”
“I didn’t say it was rational.” His smile was soft, private. “We were married six months later. Everyone said it was too fast. We said they were probably right. We did it anyway.”
He told me about their wedding—small, just family, she’d worn her grandmother’s dress and he’d forgotten his vows halfway through and had to improvise.
He told me how she’d insisted on the reading chair by the window because the light was perfect in the mornings. About her laugh—loud, unexpected, the kind that made strangers in restaurants turn and smile. About her obsession with terrible reality TV and her inability to cook anything more complex than pasta.
He told me about the Thanksgiving turkey that was somehow burned on the outside and frozen in the middle. “We ended up ordering Chinese food and eating it out of the containers while the fire department aired out the apartment. She laughed so hard she cried. Best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
He told me about the diagnosis. The six months. The way she’d handled it with more grace than he had—making lists, writing letters for anniversaries she wouldn’t be there for.
“She made me promise to keep living,” he said quietly. “Made me swear I wouldn’t just shut down.”
“Have you? Kept the promise?”
“I’m trying now.” He looked at me, and there was something raw in his expression. “Because of you.”
“I’m not trying to replace her.”
“I know. And you couldn’t, even if you wanted to. But that’s not what this is.” He took my hand. “Sarah would have hated seeing me closed off like I was. She probably would have liked you, actually. She had a weakness for chaos.”
“I’m not chaos.”
“You attracted a magical plague of ex-boyfriends, including a man in a leisure suit who wanted to put a disco ball on my chandelier.”
“Okay, I’m a little chaos.”
“You’re a lot chaos.” He squeezed my hand. “That’s why it works.”
I looked around the apartment. At Sarah’s photos and books and the sweater still draped over the chair.
“I’m going to knock something over eventually,” I said. “In my head, I’ve already broken three picture frames.”
“I’d forgive you.”
