I walked into my company party and found my husband’s arm wrapped around a coworker’s waist, and then, in front of everyone, he told me I had never been anything more than his housekeeper.

Carl looked at him.

Then he looked at me.

And then he turned around and walked back toward the restaurant, because everything he thought he owned was suddenly inside that building, in a cardboard box.

Grace drove over from campus that night, twenty-five minutes in fifteen.

She found me at the kitchen table at 11:40, still in my dress, with both halves of the picture laid on the wood.

She is nineteen, and she has her grandmother Ruth’s chin.

She read the whole story in my face before I said a word.

Ben came downstairs in his socks, rubbing his eyes, and Grace sat down on one side of me, and Ben on the other, and I told them everything, including the part about David.

Ben was quiet for a very long time.

“So Mr. Whitaker,” he said. “He’s, like, my grandfather.”

“Biologically.”

Ben nodded slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I’m okay with that.”