Chapter 3

The rest of the dinner did not end. It simply stopped, the way a song stops when someone cuts the power, and the guests sat at the long farm tables with the wine going warm in their glasses and the candles burning down to nothing. No one ate the cake. No one asked for coffee. The caterer stood by the side door and watched, and the bride — the bride who was supposed to be the center of the night — sat at the head table with her hands flat on the linen and did not look at her grandmother.

Adaeze sat back down in her chair, two seats down from the head table, and she did not look at anyone. She looked at her hands, at the thin gold band on her right hand, the one she had never taken off, the one she had worn through the divorce and the years of night shifts and the morning she signed the loan agreement in a lawyer's office with the fluorescent lights humming overhead.

The room was murmuring now, the low hum of people who were trying to figure out what to do with what they had just heard. Someone at the far table stood up and said something to his wife, and his wife shook her head, and they sat back down, trapped by the social weight of a wedding weekend that had not yet officially ended.

Marcus came around the head table. He walked slowly, the way he had walked through the kitchen door the night he told her he was leaving, and he stood in front of her, his hands at his sides, his shaved head catching the string lights.

"Can we talk?" he said.

Adaeze looked up at him. She had known this man for twenty-six years. She had married him when she was twenty-three, had two children with him, had worked beside him and fought with him and forgiven him more times than she could count. She had also signed her name below his on a piece of paper that was now folded in her pocket, and she had spent a decade paying for a house she no longer lived in because he could not hold a job and his mother would not help and someone had to.