My smile faltered. I barely remembered saying it, though I didn’t doubt that I had.
“I thought you were happy,” he said.
“I was,” I admitted. “I am.”
“Exactly,” he said, and something in the word carried more grief than I’d heard from him in years.
And suddenly, sitting in that repurposed guest room at three in the morning with a kitten named after his mother asleep in his arms, I understood exactly why he had hidden six months of feeding cages and midnight shifts from me. It was never about thinking I’d be upset over the kittens.
“What did you think I would say, Greg?”
He shifted Susan a little higher against his chest, buying himself a second before he had to answer.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not true.”
He looked away toward the dark window. I let the silence sit there until he filled it.
