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“I think I want to sleep alone tonight.”

He is quiet for a moment. “Guest room?”

“Yes.”

There. Boundary restored.

Kell looks at me for another second, then nods. “Okay.”

No argument. No demand that because we just had sex he gets the rest of the night too. He gets out of bed, pulls on his jeans, and bends to pick up his shirt.

That should make it easier.

Instead, watching him leave my bedroom feels worse than having to explain myself would have.

By Saturday evening, three days of careful normal have passed between us. I’m standing in front of the refrigerator trying to decide whether leftover chicken counts as dinner. Kell spent most of the day at the studio and brought one small canvas home with him because he isn’t finished arguing with it. He’s spent most of the evening painting over what he painted yesterday, which seems like a spectacular waste of expensive supplies to me and, according to Kell, is how he learns.

“I don’t want chicken,” I say.

“You didn’t want it yesterday either.”

“I ate it yesterday.”

“You complained while you ate it.”

I shut the refrigerator and turn toward him. “I complained on principle.”

Kell grins. “You still ate it.”

I consider the Blue Plate, but I don’t want the Blue Plate either. I want someplace with cloth napkins and a wine list and food I don’t have to remove from a plastic container first.

And then I think of Bellafonte. The name brings everything attached to it along a second later. Bellafonte is in Springfield, far enough away that going there always felt like an occasion. Dave and I celebrated most of our anniversaries there after we discovered it. Birthdays too, if we felt like making the drive. Once for a promotion. Once because he’d finally finished a project that had consumed most of his waking life for six months. We always claimed we didn’t need a reason to go, though maybe I did. I haven’t been back since he died.

I’ve thought about it. Twice I even got as far as checking for a reservation before closing the page again. Who was I going to go with?

Kell sets down the brush. “What are you thinking about?”

“There’s a restaurant in Springfield I love.”

“Then why are we going to eat chicken?”

The question is so immediate that I laugh. “It’s not that kind of restaurant.”

“What kind is it?”

“Nice.”

He pauses over the distinction, then gestures toward the refrigerator. “The chicken isn’t nice?”

“The chicken is currently three days old.”

“Then it’s probably worse than not nice.”

I lean against the counter, suddenly less certain about bringing up the rest of it, but I do. “Bellafonte is where Dave and I used to go for anniversaries and birthdays. It was sort of our place.”

Kell has never developed the careful expression other people sometimes adopt when I mention Dave, as if his name has sharp edges. He listens when I talk about him and asks questions when he has them. Mostly, he accepts that Dave was part of my life and therefore remains part of me.

“You liked going there,” he says.