That was the strange part I still think about now, the part that feels almost embarrassing in hindsight. I was the wife. I was the woman whose name was on the mortgage, whose paycheck paid half the bills, whose hands had scrubbed the baseboards before our first Thanksgiving dinner, whose grandmother’s wedding china sat boxed in the dining room cabinet because Caleb was afraid we would break it if we used it too often. I had a right to walk through that door as loudly as I wanted.
But that night, a little after midnight in a quiet suburb outside Columbus, Ohio, I parked at the curb instead of the driveway because gravel gives people away.