I opened the lock app.
There are three fingerprints on that door.
Mine. Cassian’s. And a third one with no name on it, added eight months ago.
It has come through my front door forty-seven times.
Almost always between one and three in the morning.
And on at least eleven of those nights, my husband was already in the apartment with me.
PART 2 — THE SEVENTIETH
Cassian and I met in 2018 and married in 2020.
He is a structural technician for a firm that does bridges and he is the single most predictable human being I have ever loved. Same coffee. Same route. Same three shirts.
His mother is Sabine Pellier and she is seventy-one and lives eleven miles away, and she is warm and social and there is one door in that woman that has never opened.
There was a brother.
I knew that in the abstract, the way you know a thing about somebody’s family. Cassian had a twin. The twin died at four. There was an accident at a lake in 1997.
It came up perhaps four times in six years and every single time it was Cassian who closed it, not his mother.
Last spring was Sabine’s seventieth. Thirty-five people at her house.
I had been clearing a cupboard for her two weeks before that and had found a shoebox, and in it was a photograph I had never seen: two small boys, four years old, identical, on a step, one of them laughing.
I had it in my bag that afternoon because I was going to ask her about it quietly, and because I thought a seventieth was a day you might be allowed to.
I got it out at the end of the kitchen and had it in my hand.
And Cassian came the length of that room and took it out of my hand.
He did not look at it. He put it face down on the sideboard and left his palm flat on the back of it.
And he said, to thirty-five people:
“Give me that. My brother died when he was four, and we don’t do that at my mother’s table. Put it away and sit down.”
