EDMUND’S POV
I should say, before anything else, that I felt good walking into that house.
This is the part I keep returning to afterward, not the toast, not the morning that followed, but the specific quality of how I felt in the first hour of my own birthday party. Light. Almost relaxed, which was a sensation I had not experienced in connection with my marriage in some weeks. I remember standing just inside the entrance with Rose beside me and feeling, for the first time since the breakfast table, that perhaps the worst of this transition was behind me.
Rebecca had greeted me warmly. She had kissed my cheek the way she always had at events, with the easy affection of a wife who is glad her husband has arrived. She had welcomed Rose with a graciousness that I registered, in the moment
