Dr. Abernathy nodded.
“That sounds exhausting,” she said.
“It is,” Nigel and I said at the same time.
And then, for the first time in weeks, we both laughed.
Sometime in the second month, I moved back into our bedroom.
I don’t remember the exact day. There wasn’t a big moment. One night I just walked past Rose’s room and kept going down the hall, and opened our door, and Nigel was sitting on the edge of the bed with a book.
He looked up.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. He just waited, the way he’d waited outside the bathroom door.
I got into bed on my side.
After a while, he turned off the lamp.
We lay there in the dark. And for once, the dark didn’t feel like the enemy. It felt like something we’d both lived in for a very long time.
