He came home from the northern border assessment on a Friday evening to find Zara had made dinner.
Not an unusual thing. Zara cooked with the same focused pleasure she brought to most things she chose to do, and Friday evenings had become, over two years of marriage, the particular domestic anchor of their week, the meal that was unhurried and the conversation that had nowhere to be afterward.
What was unusual was that she had clearly been thinking about something since morning and had decided the dinner was where she was going to say it.
He recognized the quality immediately. Zara did not manage things. She held them until the right moment and then she said them directly, which was one of the reasons he had known from very early in their relationship that she was someone worth building a life with.
He sat down, and she sat across from him, and they ate for a while in the comfortable quiet of their particular shared life, and then she set down her fork and looked at him.
