Elise had learned to read the tremor in Daniel’s hands the way one learns to read a shifting weather vane—early warning of a storm still gathering beyond sight. But even then, she hadn’t expected the flare.

The matchhead scraped and sparked, slicing the afternoon gray with a violent orange snap. Reflex overtook thought. Elise lunged forward and smacked his wrist. The flame died in a hiss against damp paper, smoke rising in a coil that smelled faintly of ink and regret. She looked down. The match had scorched the corner of a photograph: Yosemite, fifteen years ago, her arm slung around Daniel’s waist, her thumb hooked in his belt loop, both of them laughing at a gust of wind that had threatened to topple their tripod. Now a charred crescent chewed through the image, leaving her half-erased.

Gasoline sloshed as she shifted, soaking into her flats. The fumes clawed at her throat.

“Stop,” Elise said, her voice low and steady, the way she used to talk to the neighbor’s spooked horse. “Whatever this is, we don’t fix it with fire.”

Daniel didn’t look at her. His gaze had wandered past her shoulder, to the line of skeletal beeches that marked the edge of the field. The branches clacked together as the wind moved through, like brittle bones rattling in a sack. His head bowed. The matchbook trembled in his grip.

“Elise—anh ấy đã đốt những bức ảnh,” he murmured, the Vietnamese rolling out flat, as if narrating someone else’s crime.

Her breath snagged. “Who did?”

He rubbed the matchhead with his thumb, slow, hesitant. “Me.”

Elise bent her head and nudged at the wreckage with her shoe. Frames lay strewn across the grass like wounded birds. Their twentieth anniversary dinner in Beacon, candlelight catching the rim of her wineglass, his hand cupping hers across the table. Daniel and Nadia on the dock at Lake Placid, their daughter twelve then, face solemn as a saint with the fishing rod propped against her shoulder. A scatter of letters glistened, waterlogged—the loops and slashes unmistakably hers. Early emails, printed out in a giddy stage when permanence had felt like romance instead of weight.

She folded her arms tight to keep them from shaking. “Tell me the truth. All of it. Why lie about the funeral?”

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. When they opened again, they were bleached of color, the washed-out blue of an overexposed sky.

“There is a funeral,” he said. “But not today. Saturday.” His throat worked as he inhaled. “I needed to be here alone.”

“Why?”

“Because…” The word cracked. Then the rest tumbled out, ragged and unpracticed. “Because I’m not sure what parts of my life are mine anymore. The photos—they make a story. Neat, linear, kind. A version of me worth keeping. But it leaves no room for the days I wanted to vanish. I thought if I could…wipe it clean…”

“By torching our marriage archive?” Elise felt anger bloom, sharp and precise, cutting through her fear. “You don’t get to rewrite us with a match, Daniel. You talk.”

He sank onto the rim of an overturned wheelbarrow. For a long moment, silence held, broken only by the tinny tap-tap of a loose sign swinging against the shed. When he finally looked up, Elise saw the boy beneath—the frightened, unvarnished self she hadn’t glimpsed in years.

“I’ve been seeing a therapist,” he said. “Since March.” A humorless huff escaped. “I didn’t tell you because I thought I could fix it first, then bring you the finished result. Like the kitchen renovation.” He paused, shaking his head. “He says I’ve been curating a narrative—good father, good husband, competent lawyer. Cropping out the pieces that don’t fit. And when Dad died…something cracked. I started waking at three a.m., certain I’d never loved anyone the way I claimed. That I was a fraud.”

Elise pressed her nails into her forearms, biting back words.

“Last month,” Daniel went on, voice frayed, “I took a walk after work. Didn’t come home for nine hours. I told you I was stuck on a case. I sat on a bench by the river, watching lights flicker on the water, trying to recall a single day that felt true. I couldn’t.”

Elise’s heart pounded so hard she could hear it in her ears. Still she said nothing.

“There’s more.” He swallowed. “Last summer, I met someone. Briefly. Not an affair.” He raised a palm, swearing. “We talked in a hotel bar at a conference. She asked me what I loved. Not what I did—what I loved. I couldn’t answer. It scared me.” He looked down at the dirt. “I came home and doubled down on being impressive. Ironed my shirts. Coached Nadia’s mock trial team. Opened a college fund spreadsheet. But inside? I felt like a ghost.”

Elise looked at the photos again—the glossy catalog of a life built carefully, year by year. Her throat burned. “You should have told me,” she whispered. The last word shredded as it left her mouth.

“I know.” He dragged a hand over his face. “When you pulled up, I realized what I was doing wasn’t cleansing. It was violence. Against you. Nadia. Myself.”

The matchbook slipped from his fingers, landing in the dirt like a surrendered weapon.

Elise crouched. Her hands trembled as she lifted photographs from the damp, laying them one by one against the clapboards of the shed to dry. Daniel watched, then dropped to his knees beside her. Together they spread the pictures out, rows of glossy rectangles shedding their gasoline sheen in the cold light.

A brittle letter clung to his palm when he reached into the pile. Elise saw the ink, recognized the words before he spoke. It was the note she’d written the day after Nadia was born: You fell asleep holding my elbow, like an anxious anchor.

They worked in silence. Wind lifted strands of Elise’s hair, carrying the faint chemical tang of gasoline into the trees. Time stretched, marked only by the soft slap of wet paper against wood.

At last Elise broke the hush. “I want to believe you,” she said. “But not as a performance.” She gestured at the salvaged sprawl of their history. “We face this. And then we decide.”

Daniel nodded, eyes wet, his mouth trembling open and shut like a man learning how to breathe again.

The sky shifted. A shade lighter, a gray giving way to something almost tender. It felt, to Elise, as if the afternoon itself were trying for honesty.