After everything I had lost as a child, ordinary felt like a miracle.
I was four when the fire took my biological parents.
That was what the paperwork said, anyway, and what little I remembered confirmed it. Smoke. A blanket around my shoulders. A woman I did not know carrying me down a driveway.The rest had been sealed away in adoption records I never asked to open.
« You don’t want to know? » Ben had asked me once, early in our marriage.
He had been folding laundry, his uniform shirt across his lap.
« I know enough, » I told him. « I survived. I found a family that loved me. Then I found you. That’s all I need. »
He had kissed my forehead then, slow and careful, like I was something he was afraid of breaking.
Looking back, I realized he hadn’t been asking out of idle curiosity. He had been trying to learn how much I already knew.On the morning of our fifth anniversary, Ben stood in the kitchen with his phone in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.
