“From sleeping down here for three weeks?”
“…possibly.”
I pressed both hands over my face and just breathed for a moment. When I lowered them, the question that had been sitting under all the others finally worked its way to the front. “Why that blanket, Greg? Out of everything in this house.”
His eyes drifted to Susan, curled now against my chest inside the faded blue knitting, utterly unaware of the small earthquake she’d set off in our marriage.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You kept that blanket through three house moves. You wouldn’t even let me throw away Michael’s kindergarten lunchbox because, and I quote, it had ‘historical significance.'”
“It had his dinosaur stickers on it.”
“It smelled like twenty-year-old peanut butter.”
“History isn’t always pleasant, darling,” he said, and for a second some of the old warmth flickered back between us, before his face grew serious again. He reached out and touched one corner of the blanket where it lay against Susan’s tiny body. “When I picked her up tonight, she was so cold. I went looking for something soft, and I remembered I’d already taken it to the rescue a few nights before — one of the bottle babies there was struggling, and I just…” He trailed off, staring at the worn knit pattern like it might finish the sentence for him. “I reached for what used to work.”
