Page 46 of Wrong Mail

And then I say it without planning to.

"You had a gun in the house for two years."

David doesn't stop with the corkscrew. "Yes."

"And you never thought to tell me."

"No."

"That's it? No?" I say. "I thought we agreed we wouldn't have any secrets."

"Would you have let me keep it if you knew?"

"No."

"There you go."

There's a pause.

"When did you get it?" I ask. “And why?"

He sets the bottle down. He's still in the good half of the evening, the pre-dinner calm, and I watch him decide how much of this to discuss now, with a guest ten minutes out.

“Look, I bought it in Oregon," he says. “We were moving to a house on a dead-end road. You aren't driving. You were sleeping badly. I was going to be away for work. I planned to tell you. I just wanted to know that if something ever happened, you had an option. But nothing did. And I forgot about it. I mean, think about it, Mallory. We've been here two years and it's been so peaceful." He says it evenly, full of reason. It’s the same voice he uses on frightened families in corridors. "I keep it latched. I keep it where you'd never go. I’ve never once taken it out."

"Until two nights ago, when a police officer asked and you said yes, right there in front of me. That's when I found out my whole marriage had a locked cupboard in it I didn't know about."

"Mallory, let’s not blow this out of proportion.”

"I keep asking myself why you didn't tell me." I hear my voice climbing and bring it down, because of the time. "And the only answer I get is that you knew what I'd say."

Now something comes into his face, the first real thing all evening. "You'd have said get it out of the house. I would have argued. You'd have cried. It would have become this enormous thing between us about safety and control and what you can bear. And at the end of it I'd either have a wife who felt unsafe in her bed, or a gun in a storage unit doing nobody any good." He spreads his hands. "So I made a call." He picks the bottle back up. "I'm sorry. I should have told you."

"It's not about the gun," I say quietly. "It's that you can keep a thing from me for two years, completely, and I'd never know. That's what I found out the other night. Not that we own a gun. That you can do that."

He goes still.

The doorbell rings. Its new chime, which we're both still learning, sounds absurdly cheerful in the kitchen. David holds my eyes a second past the moment, his jaw tight.

"That's your guest," he says.

Then he goes to answer the door, and the moment closes over like water.

Henry has brought flowers, which is exactly wrong and exactly right. You bring flowers to a woman who has been through something. It's a kind thing to do, and it makes David stand a half-inch taller in his hallway.

"For the house," Henry says, handing them past me to David, which is clever, giving them to the man. David takes them, because what else do you do? Now my husband is holding a bunch of white stock flowers like a groomsman who's lost the wedding.

"Henry," David says. "Please, come in. I wanted to thank you for all you’ve done. Today. The other night. Everything."

"Ah, I just did what anyone else would have."

"You're too modest," David says. "Not everyone would."

And they just look at each other in the hallway, the two of them, and it's almost warm, almost the thing it's pretending to be. Then we go into the dining room.

It goes wrong so slowly that I can't point to where or when it happened.

The food is fine. The wine is better than fine, and I drink more of it than I should.