The drive home was eleven minutes.
Nathan knew this because he had driven it enough times to have stopped noticing it in the way you stop noticing the length of a routine, but today he was aware of every one of them. The route down Colorado, the turn onto Lake, the residential streets with their orderly procession of well-kept houses narrowing toward theirs. Eleven minutes in which Maryanne sat in the passenger seat with her bag in her lap and her eyes forward and said nothing.
He did not attempt to fill it.
He had learned, across eleven years, the taxonomy of Maryanne's silences — which ones were comfortable and which ones were processing and which ones were the specific, charged quiet of a woman who was deciding how to say the thing she had already decided to say. This one was the thi
