"I found out this morning while you were at Cormac's. Nadine wants the acceptance signed by Friday. Three years. I can't take the Green Spine and also pack for New Haven as if both lives fit in the same suitcase."
Declan's thumb found his wedding band and turned it once, a habit older than this crisis. "You didn't tell me at the bus stop."
"You didn't have an umbrella," she said, and the line might have been a joke if her voice had not gone quiet at the end. "You looked like a man who had already left. I didn't want to hand you a reason to finish the job."
"That isn't fair."
"Neither is deciding our geography in your father's kitchen with your sister taking notes."
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "I haven't decided."
"You left your umbrella behind like a man who doesn't plan to walk back."
"I left it because I was angry."
"Anger is a plan with worse manners."
Arlo glanced over, then found somewhere else to look. Declan lowered his voice. "If I take New Haven, we could do weekends. I could commute some weeks. People do it."
"People do it," Rhea agreed. "People also become careful strangers who exchange grocery lists by text and call it partnership."
"And if I stay, and you take the grant, I watch you build the corridor while I keep patching boiler schedules and telling myself ambition is selfish."
"Ambition isn't selfish. Silence is."
The word hung between them, heavier than the rain. Declan's phone buzzed on the table. Brenna's name lit the screen. He rejected the call. It buzzed again. He rejected it again. A text arrived immediately: Answer. Dad asked if you're coming back for the umbrella or if he should throw it out with the rest of your childhood.
Rhea read the upside-down text without pretending she hadn't. "She's good at that."
"She's terrified Cormac will die in that duplex alone and the last person who saw him will be a realtor."
"And you're terrified that if you stay you become the son who never got out, and if you go you become the husband who left while I was planting trees."
Declan looked at her for a long time. "Yes."
"Then we are not having a misunderstanding," Rhea said. "We are having a marriage."
He almost smiled. It did not hold. "What do you want me to do?"