“Sorry.”
“You’re somewhere else.”
“Long day.”
She smiled and reached across the table.
“Only twenty-one more days.”
He looked at the diamond on her finger.
Twenty-one days.
Then she would be his wife.
For the first time since asking her to marry him, the thought did not fill him with happiness.
It filled him with unease.
Adrian did not confront her.
Not yet.
He wanted to believe the wine incident had been an exception.
Stress.
Wedding pressure.
A bad morning.
People had ugly moments.
Marriage required understanding imperfection, not pretending it did not exist.
So Adrian watched.
Quietly.
And within forty-eight hours, he understood that the wine had been nothing.
Elena arrived every morning at six thirty.
Adrian had always thought of her as efficient and reserved.
He realized he had never truly noticed the amount of invisible labor she performed.
His grandmother Eleanor was eighty and had lived at the estate since a fall injured her knee the previous winter.
Elena prepared her breakfast before anyone else woke.
Oatmeal on Mondays.
Soft eggs on Tuesdays.
Toast cut into narrow rectangles because Eleanor’s hands occasionally shook.
She placed medications beside the correct plate without making Eleanor feel helpless.
When Eleanor forgot where she had left her reading glasses, Elena knew.
When the older woman’s knee hurt before rain, Elena brought a warmed compress without being asked.
Every afternoon, Eleanor told the same story about meeting Adrian’s grandfather at a school dance in 1962.
Elena listened every time as though hearing it for the first time.
“You see,” Eleanor would say, “he was terrible at dancing.”
Elena smiled.
“But very handsome?”
“Insufferably handsome.”
The next afternoon, Eleanor told it again.
Elena laughed at exactly the same parts.
Adrian began noticing other things.
