She stayed the Wife for two more days after that — two mornings of easy recognition, two evenings of her tracing the grain of the dining table without knowing she was tracing anything at all, just a body remembering what a mind couldn't yet account for. Thomas let himself have those two days without doing the math on when they'd end, which was its own kind of small, defiant peace, and which he understood, some low animal part of him, would cost him precisely as much as he'd borrowed against it.

On the third night she went to bed clear-eyed and steady, kissed him with the unhurried confidence of a woman who expects to wake up in the same life she fell asleep in. He lay beside her a long time before sleep took him, listening to the house settle, and some quieter, more superstitious part of him — the part that still, after two years, hadn't fully made peace with a universe this arbitrary — thought: let this be the version that stays.

It wasn't.

The gasp woke him before the alarm did.

Thomas opened his eyes to find her already sitting up, sheets clutched to her chest with both fists, staring at him the way you'd stare at a man who'd broken into your house and then, worse, made himself a cup of coffee while he waited for you to notice.

He didn't move. He'd learned, the hard way, in the second month after the fog started rolling in for real, that moving fast in these moments only made it worse — made him look like exactly the kind of threat her body was already bracing for, a shape looming in a bed that wasn't supposed to have a second person in it.

"Who—" Her voice cracked on the single syllable. Her eyes flicked to the door, the window, the space between the bed and the hallway, mapping an exit with the swift, unconscious efficiency of an animal that has just realized it is not alone in what it believed was a sealed den. "Who are you? Where's — whose room is this?"

Two nights ago she'd kissed him in this same bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. This morning she looked at him like he was something she'd have to explain to the police, and the whiplash of it — after two years, he still hadn't built enough callus to absorb it cleanly — landed somewhere just beneath his ribs and stayed there.

He kept his hands visible, palms loose against his knees, and pitched his voice into the register he'd practiced so many times it barely felt like acting anymore, though it still cost him everything, every single time, the way a muscle can be strong from repetition and still ache with each new use. Low. Even. Unhurried. The voice you'd use on a spooked animal, or a child waking from a nightmare into a room that wasn't theirs.

"My name's Thomas," he said. "You're safe. This is your house. I know it doesn't feel like it right now, and I know that's frightening, but nothing bad is happening to you. You can take your time."

"This isn't—" She looked down at the sweater she was wearing — his old gray one, the one she'd pulled on without thinking two nights ago, back when it had felt like coming home instead of like evidence in a crime she couldn't remember committing. "This isn't my house. I don't — I don't know this room. I don't know you."

"I understand." He did not move closer. He had learned that closing distance too fast read as cornering, no matter how gently he meant it, the way even a well-intentioned hand can look like a threat if it moves too quickly toward someone already bracing for one. "You're going to have some questions, and I'll answer every one of them, but I want you to know first — you're not in danger. You've never been in danger here. Not once."

Her breathing didn't slow. Her eyes searched his face the way you'd search for a lie, feature by feature, cataloguing him the way she might catalogue a stranger on a train she was deciding whether to sit beside, and he made himself hold still and let her look, because flinching from the scrutiny would only confirm whatever fear was building behind her eyes.

"Where's my phone," she said. Not a question. A demand, sharpened at the edges by fear doing what fear does — reaching for the nearest tool, the nearest fact-checking device, the nearest thread back to a version of the world that made sense.

"On the nightstand, your side. It's yours. Nobody's touched it." He kept his hands where she could see them. "There's no lock on it you don't already know. You can check anything you want to check."

She grabbed it like a life raft, thumb jabbing at the screen, and he watched her face cycle through something he recognized now with the flat, exhausted familiarity of a man watching the same storm pass over the same field for the two-hundredth time — confusion, then a kind of frantic scrolling, texts and photos she didn't remember sending or taking, dates that made no sense against whatever last stable memory her mind was still holding onto. He knew what she was seeing, roughly. Six months of a life recorded in a phone that belonged, according to every message and photo in it, unmistakably to her.

"This doesn't — I don't remember any of this," she said, and her voice had gone thin and young, stripped down to something closer to panic than anger now. "There's a — there's a text here from someone named Julian about a recital. I don't dance. I've never — what is this?"

"You've been taking a movement class," Thomas said carefully. "For a few months now. You're good at it. You like it a lot."

"How would you know that."

"Because I drive you there." He kept his tone flat, informational, nothing in it that asked for credit or gratitude. Just facts, laid out like tools on a bench, in the order she could pick them up without cutting herself on the sharp ones first. "Every week. I wait in the car, sometimes, or I go get coffee. You come home glowing, most days."

She stared at him, and something in her expression shifted from fear into a kind of wary, exhausted calculation — the look of someone doing arithmetic she desperately didn't want to do, adding up a column of evidence her own memory refused to corroborate. "You drive me. You know things about my life I don't know. You're in my — in this bed." Her hand went, unconsciously, to the thin scar along her hairline, fingers pressing there like she was checking it was still real, still hers, the one piece of hard evidence her body carried that her mind couldn't dispute. "Are you my — are we—"

"We're married," he said, because there was no version of the truth gentler than the truth itself, not at this stage, not when the alternative was letting her build an even worse story out of the silence. Silence, he had learned, was never neutral in a moment like this — it filled itself, given the chance, with whatever the fear could construct, and the fear could always construct something worse than the truth.

He watched it land. Watched her face do the thing it always did with this particular fact — not disbelief, exactly, because some deep animal part of her clearly registered that he wasn't lying, that the room around them held two years of a life too specific and lived-in to be fabricated: the two mugs by the sink downstairs, the second toothbrush, the closet full of clothes sized to a body she was currently occupying. It was something closer to grief. Grief for a marriage she couldn't feel, standing in the exact shape of it with none of the memory that should have filled it, like a hand pressed into a mold long after the plaster had been poured and removed.

"I don't—" Her voice wavered, and for a second he thought she might cry, and braced himself, because there was nothing in the world harder than watching her cry over the loss of something he still had, whole and complete, right here in his own chest, undiminished by any of it. "I don't feel married. I don't feel like I know you at all."

"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to feel anything you don't. I'm not going to pretend the last version of you is still sitting in this room. She's not, today. You are. And I'd like to introduce myself to you properly, if that's alright, instead of assuming you owe me a version of this conversation you don't have access to."

That seemed to catch her off guard — the concession, maybe, or the phrasing, careful and rehearsed as it was, worn smooth from having been said some version of this many times before in rooms just like this one. She studied him a moment longer, some of the fear in her shoulders loosening by a fraction, replaced by the beginnings of something more clinical. Curiosity. He'd take curiosity. Curiosity he could work with; fear, left unchecked, only ever hardened into something harder to talk down.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Thomas."

"That's right."

"If we're married." Her jaw tightened. "Why do you look like you're talking to someone dangerous."

It was the sharpest thing she'd said yet, and it cut cleanly, because it was true, because two years of practice had built him a voice for exactly this scenario and she'd caught the seams of it in under five minutes, faster than most. He allowed himself, for just a second, to drop the performance a degree — not all the way, never all the way, not this early in a morning that could still tip either direction — but enough that something more honest showed through, some crack in the careful architecture he'd built for exactly these mornings.

"Because the last time this happened," he said quietly, "you were frightened, and I moved too fast, and it made things worse. I'd rather be slow and careful with you a hundred times than fast and wrong once."

Something in her face changed at that. Not trust — not yet, not close to it — but the first flicker of something adjacent to it. A recalculation. The dangerous stranger theory losing ground, however slightly, to a stranger theory instead — merely strange, not dangerous. A smaller, more survivable category to occupy for however long this particular morning turned out to last.

"Okay," she said again, and pulled the sheet a little less tightly against her chest. "Okay. Where's the bathroom. And — I guess. Where do I keep my clothes."

He stood, slow, deliberate, and crossed to the closet, keeping enough distance that she could track every step of it. He opened the door and gestured, not touching anything of hers, letting her see for herself — the clothes that were unmistakably sized to her body, worn in at the elbows and knees in the specific way only her own wearing could have made them, a green sweater she must have loved because three separate versions of it hung there in slightly different states of wear.

"Whatever you need," he said. "Take your time. I'll be downstairs. There's coffee, whenever you're ready — I'll leave it on the counter so you don't have to come find me if you're not ready for that yet."

He walked out without looking back, because looking back would have meant watching her watch him leave, cataloguing his exit the way she'd cataloged his face, filing him under a heading she hadn't decided on yet.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, he gripped the edge of the counter with both hands and stood there for a long moment, not moving, doing the thing he never let her see him do — breathing through it, alone, the way you'd breathe through a wave you knew was coming and still couldn't brace hard enough for. His reflection in the dark window over the sink looked, he thought distantly, like a man twice his age.

Eleven days. He'd had eleven days of her hand finding his under the table, of her laugh at his bad jokes, of being known, fully and specifically, by the one person whose knowing had ever mattered. And this morning he'd introduced himself to her like a man applying for a job he'd already held for two years, and somewhere upstairs she was standing in a closet full of clothes that fit a body she didn't recognize as her own, trying to figure out which version of a life she was willing to trust.

He poured the coffee. He set it on the counter, exactly where he'd said he would, because keeping his word to her — even the smallest, most mundane version of his word — was the only architecture he had left to build with some mornings, the only thing he could still control when everything else about her had gone unpredictable as weather.

He heard the shower start upstairs, and beneath it, faint, the sound of her testing a hairdryer she must have found, then abandoning it, then the specific quiet of someone getting dressed slowly, carefully, in a room they've been told is theirs but doesn't yet feel like it.

Then he sat down at the table he'd built with his own hands, and waited, the way he always waited, for whoever came down the stairs next.

---

She came down twenty minutes later in jeans and the green sweater — the least worn of the three, he noted, the one she must have reached for on instinct without knowing why her hand went there first — hair still damp, moving with the deliberate carefulness of someone crossing a room they weren't sure would hold their weight. She stopped in the doorway rather than coming all the way in, one hand braced against the frame, and looked at the second mug he'd set out at the far end of the table, a small, considering distance between it and his own.

"That's for me," he said, not quite a question, watching her decide whether to believe it.

"Okay." She crossed to it and sat, not across from him but one chair down, close enough to be civil and far enough to feel like a choice she'd made on purpose. She wrapped both hands around the mug without drinking from it, the universal gesture of someone using warmth as a substitute for words. "So. You said we're married. How long."

"Two years in October."

"And you — what, work from home? You're here a lot, aren't you. I can tell. This kitchen has your fingerprints all over it. That drawer sticks in a way somebody who lived here forty years would know to lift before pulling."

"I run a furniture workshop. Barn out back." He nodded toward the window, toward the low roofline visible past the apple tree. "I set my own hours, mostly. Comes in useful."

"Useful for what." She said it lightly, but her eyes had sharpened, and he understood she was testing the shape of the answer before she trusted the content of it.

"For days like today," he said, because there was no version of this that benefited from softening. "I like being able to be here."

She held his gaze a moment, something working behind her eyes, and then looked down into the coffee like it might offer a second opinion. "That's either the kindest thing anyone's said to me all morning or the most controlling, and I genuinely can't tell which yet."

"Fair," Thomas said, and meant it — he'd asked himself the same question enough times, lying awake, to recognize it wasn't an unreasonable one. "I'd rather you decide slowly and get it right than decide fast because I rushed you."

Something in her posture eased, fractionally, the white-knuckle grip on the mug loosening by degrees. "You keep saying things like that. Careful things. Do you always talk like you're defusing something?"

"Only for the last two years," he said, and watched her flinch slightly at the number, the size of it landing somewhere she couldn't yet locate.

"What was I like," she asked, quieter now, "before whatever this is. Before the — gaps."

He thought about it longer than the question probably warranted, not because he didn't know the answer but because he wanted to get it right, wanted to hand her something true and not merely comforting. "Impatient," he said finally. "Funnier than me, though I'd never admit that if you remembered enough to hold it against me later. You restored paintings for a living — old ones, damaged ones. You used to say the whole job was learning to trust that something ruined could still be worth the time it took to fix."

Her hand had gone still on the mug. "I did that? For work?"

"You were good at it. There's a piece hanging in the hallway you spent four months on, before the accident. I can show you, if you want."

She was quiet for a long moment, turning the coffee slowly, and when she looked up again there was something new in her face — not trust, not yet, but the first real crack in the wariness, a door left open rather than merely unlocked. "Show me," she said. "I think I'd like to see what I used to think was worth saving."

He stood, and she followed him down the hall, and if he walked slower than he needed to, matching his pace to hers so she never once had to catch up, she didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't say.