She knew before he came downstairs.
She had woken at two-fifty to the sound of nothing, actually. The house was quiet but there was a quality to the quiet that was different from sleeping-quiet, and she had learned, over weeks of living in this house, the texture of its different silences.
She had given it ten minutes and then she had gone down.
She had not thought about what she was doing. She had gone to the kitchen and seen him at the window and she had known, from his posture and from the set of his shoulders and from the specific quality of stillness he had that was different from his usual stillness, that the right thing was to be there without making it a thing to be managed.
So she had stood there.
She had gone back to bed and lain in the dark with the glass of water she hadn't drunk and thought about the shape of grief that was so old it had become structural, built into the walls of a person and load-bearing and impossible to remove without the whole thing shifting.
