At home, the intimacy that had matured between Mark and me turned into acts of care that felt sacred. On nights when the crew had worked overtime and the van smelled like a thousand small labors, he would hang a kettled shower for me and fix the light over the sink that flickered like a nervous thing. I would make a slow stew the next day and pack it for him when he left, and he would eat it like sacred sustenance. The s*x was quieter, more tethered; our tenderness had teeth that came from the work of showing up.
One afternoon in late summer, after an exhausting run of double shifts, Mark surprised me. He arrived with the tin box, now dented in a place that made it look better somehow. Inside, wrapped in a rag of a map, was a small, photocopied page: a pre-approval letter for a modest lin
