"Five years," Ivy said aloud, to no one.

The apartment was quiet except for Mozart - the Serenade No. 13, soft and civilized, drifting from the Bluetooth speaker she'd set up on the kitchen counter that afternoon. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, hands drying on a dish towel, and looked at what she'd spent the last two days building.

The new linen curtains hung straight and clean, a warm oatmeal color that caught the candlelight. The couch wore its new slipcover, the deep ivory one she'd ordered twice because the first shade looked too cold in the afternoon light. One entire wall of the living room was now a warm burnt orange - she'd done it herself over a Tuesday and Wednesday, moving furniture, taping edges, recoating until the color looked like something you could lean into. A crystal vase held white lilies, opened just enough. Two white candles burned in their silver holders, already a third of the way down.

She'd been cooking since two in the afternoon.

The mushroom bisque was in the warmer. The lamb chops were resting under foil - rosemary and garlic, with the mint sauce she'd made from scratch, because she'd looked up three separate recipes before deciding the one from the French cooking blog was most likely to impress. The crème brûlée sat in the refrigerator in four individual ramekins. She'd torched the sugar three times before she got it right. The first two attempts were still in the trash, wrapped in paper towels so she wouldn't have to look at them.

She'd set the table for two. Her good bone china - wedding gifts, barely used. The tall-stemmed wine glasses. A small card tucked beside his plate that said Five years. Happy anniversary. She'd written it and rewritten it four times, because the first three versions felt either too formal or too desperate.

She sat down now in her chair at the table and looked at the empty seat across from her.

He said seven o'clock, she thought. He said he'd be home for dinner.

It was eight forty-three.

She picked up her phone. No messages. She set it back down.

This was not the first dinner she'd eaten alone. She knew that. She'd sat at this table on her birthday in March - soup from the deli downstairs, eaten standing over the sink because sitting down alone at a set table had felt too sad to bear. She'd sat at the hotel bar in Seattle the time she'd flown out to surprise him for their third anniversary and discovered his assistant had booked his calendar solid with client dinners for the entire four days.

She hadn't told him about Seattle. She'd flown home the next morning and said nothing.

She was good at saying nothing. She'd had a lot of practice.

Five years, she thought again, and this time the words felt different. Not a milestone. Just a number. A measurement of how long she'd been rearranging herself to fit inside someone else's life.

She'd grown up with nothing - that was the plain truth of it. Her parents were gone before she was ten, and the years after that had been a series of relatives' spare rooms, secondhand school uniforms, and learning very quickly not to want things too loudly. So when Adrian Hartley had looked at her - really looked at her, with that focused intensity she still couldn't entirely explain - she'd thought: this is it. This is what all the surviving was for. She'd held onto the marriage with both hands for five years, held on and polished and patched and hoped, the way you do when you've never had anything you were sure would stay.

The candles had burned down another quarter inch by the time she heard his key in the lock.

She stood. She smoothed her dress - the navy wrap dress she'd bought specifically for tonight, the one that made her waist look small.

"Adrian." She smiled. "I was starting to-"

She stopped.

He was not alone.

There were four of them behind him. Two men from his firm she recognized - Marcus, the project lead on the South Loop development, and a younger architect whose name she always forgot. Behind them, a woman with a sleek blond chignon and an open MacBook tucked under her arm. And another man, older, who was already talking on his phone.

"-telling Hendricks we can push the site visit to Thursday," the older man was saying, stepping inside without looking up.

Adrian caught Ivy's expression. Something moved across his face - a flicker of something, gone too fast for her to name.

"Change of plans," he said. "We were going over the Lakefront bid at the office and it ran long. Figured it was easier to just come back here and eat." He was already shrugging off his coat. "You don't mind, right? Just throw together whatever we've got."

Whatever we've got.

She stood there for exactly three seconds. Long enough to look at the table - the bone china, the candles, the card she'd written four times - and understand that she was going to put all of it away now.

"Of course," she said. "Make yourselves comfortable."

She moved quickly. She carried the good plates back to the cabinet one at a time. She blew out the candles. She tucked the anniversary card into her cardigan pocket without reading it again. The white lilies stayed, because moving them would require explanation.

In the kitchen, she calculated fast. The bisque was enough for six if she stretched it. The lamb chops weren't - four chops for five adults and herself, that wouldn't work. She pulled the casserole dish back out, sliced the meat thin, and built it into something she'd been calling a "sharing platter" for years at dinner parties that Adrian used to remember to warn her about. She found the cheese board, the prosciutto, the fig jam, the crackers. She opened a second bottle of the Malbec and put the Barolo back for a night when it mattered.

Twenty-two minutes. She had everything on the table in twenty-two minutes.

"This looks great," Marcus said, already helping himself. "Ivy, you're a magician."

She smiled and poured his wine.