I slowly raised my hand.
“Where did you get that?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
His face changed.
The easy smile disappeared.
His eyes moved from me to the painting.
Then back to me.
And in that moment, I knew.
This wasn’t coincidence.
“Abigail,” he said quietly, “you should sit down.”
“No.”
My voice sounded sharper than I intended.
“Tell me where you got that.”
Arthur looked toward the painting again.
“From Robert.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“What?”
“He gave it to me.”
I stared at him.
“You knew my husband?”
Arthur nodded.
And suddenly the coffee invitation wasn’t about coffee at all.
For most of my adult life, I had been needed.
There is a difference between being loved and being needed.
I didn’t understand that when I was younger.
I thought they were the same thing.
If someone called me because they needed help, I felt important.
If someone couldn’t manage without me, I felt loved.
That belief quietly shaped my entire life.
I married Robert when I was twenty-eight.
We weren’t rich.
We weren’t glamorous.
We weren’t the couple who took expensive vacations or drove new cars every year.
But we had something I thought was better.
