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Meetings that used to run until six are finished at five-thirty because apparently I have spent the last fifteen years allowing people to waste thirty minutes of my time every fucking day.

Bryant notices during one meeting where he’s also in attendance.

“You have somewhere to be?” he asks, when I stand in the middle of one of his sentences.

“Yes.”

He looks at the clock.

Then at me. Then back at the clock. It’s four forty-seven. His mouth starts to curve.

“Don’t say a goddamn thing.”

“I didn’t say anything.” His grin gets wider.

I should sit back down and endure the rest of the meeting. But I don’t; I simply leave.

Noelle told me that Shiloh has started listening for my truck.

The first time he comes running when I walk through the door, I nearly drop my briefcase. By the fifth time, I expect it. By the tenth, I look for him.

Sometimes Noelle is behind him. Sometimes she’s in the kitchen or upstairs or doing something that involves glitter, construction paper, or an alarming amount of Scotch tape.

But I look for her too.

Every fucking time.

I tell myself this is normal. She’s my wife. I should know where she is. It’s practical. I have a contract. A very thorough contract. Twenty-three pages, drafted by one of the best family-law attorneys in Tennessee.

I’m beginning to suspect it might be missing a few things.

For example, there is no clause addressing what happens when your wife falls asleep on the couch with her head on your shoulder during The Grinch and you sit there for forty-five minutes after the movie ends because you don’t want to wake her.

There is nothing about discovering that she sings while she cooks.

Badly.

Nothing about the fact that she steals the covers when she and Shiloh build a blanket fort in the great room and somehow I get dragged into it because, according to my son, every fort needs a daddy.

Nothing about how she smells when she walks past me. Or how many times a day I catch myself watching her mouth.

Or how fucking difficult it is to keep my hands to myself when she reaches around me for something in the kitchen and her breasts brush my arm.

Definitely nothing about that.

And there is absolutely nothing in those twenty-three pages explaining what I’m supposed to do with the fact that my son has started saying we.

We need more marshmallows. We have to finish the gingerbread house. We should get Daddy a Christmas sweater.

We.

Not Noelle and me. Not Daddy and me. All three of us.

We have become a we.

I don’t correct him. I buy the fucking sweater. I don’t wear it. I have my limits. Mostly.

Three nights before Christmas, I come downstairs sometime after eleven because I can’t sleep.