I laughed at him then. “That a promise or a prediction?”
“Both,” he said, dead serious in that way seventeen-year-old boys sometimes surprise you with. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Simone.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Six months after we walked across the graduation stage at Halsted State, Grady proposed on the same tailgate, same lake, same gold light, and nobody in either of our families acted surprised in the slightest. It felt, the whole way through, like something that had already been decided a long time before either of us got a say in it.
I became a happy wife, and three years into the marriage, the happy mother of our daughter, Harlow. Life in Averyville settled into the kind of rhythm you don’t appreciate until you’re standing in the middle of it, looking back — Sunday dinners at my grandmother Cora’s house, Harlow’s school recitals, Grady coaching Little League on Saturdays same as his own father used to.
Those first seven years of marriage were about as ordinary and good as I could have asked for. Grady worked his way up at a logistics company outside Averyville, steady and unremarkable in the best way, while I taught third grade at the same elementary school Harlow would eventually attend herself. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t struggling either, and every anniversary before this one had followed the same comfortable pattern — dinner somewhere nice, a card he always wrote too much in, a slow dance in the kitchen afterward to whatever song happened to come on.
My grandmother Cora Ward was ninety-one years old that year, sharp as anything despite her hips finally slowing her down, and she had one story she told more than any other, always around this time of evening, always looking out toward the water whenever we drove near Sable Lake.
“Your great-granddaddy Elijah owned a good stretch of that lakefront once,” she’d say, her voice going soft and far away. “Lost it to a man named Cornelius Wexford back in ’68. Fraud, plain and simple, though nobody with any power ever cared to prove it. That land should’ve been passed down to your mother, and then to you, baby. Some things just get taken and stay taken.”
I grew up hearing that story so many times it lost its sting somewhere along the way, turned into something closer to family folklore than an open wound. I never imagined, not once in ten years of marriage, that my husband had been quietly listening to every single telling of it too.
Two years before our tenth anniversary, Grady’s father, Otis Faulkner, passed away after a short, hard fight with lung disease that none of us saw coming until it was already advanced. Grady took it harder than I expected, even accounting for how close the two of them had always been. He got quiet in a way that wasn’t like him — long stretches of silence at dinner, nights he’d sit out on the back porch alone well past midnight, staring at nothing I could see.
“Grief moves through people different ways,” my grandmother told me, when I mentioned my worry to her one Sunday. “Give him room, baby. Some men need the quiet to work something out before they’re ready to hand it to you.”
I gave him the room. I brought him plates of food he barely touched and let him sit out on that porch alone as long as he needed, telling myself, the way you do when you love somebody, that grief just took the time it took. What I didn’t know was that Otis, on his deathbed, had told Grady a secret that had been eating at him for over fifty years.
I remember one night about six months after the funeral, finding Grady standing in the garage at nearly two in the morning, staring into an old metal box he’d shoved to the back of a shelf the same week his father died. He snapped the lid shut the second he saw me in the doorway.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, too quickly. “Just going through some of Dad’s old things.”
“You’ve been going through his old things for six months,” I said. “You want to talk about any of it?”
“Not yet,” he said, and something in his voice told me not to push. “I promise I will. Just not yet.”
I let it go that night, and most nights after, telling myself a marriage built on ten years of trust could survive a husband who needed time to grieve in his own way. I had no idea, back then, exactly how long “not yet” was going to stretch.
