Her gloved hand met mine above the frosty grave at exactly 11:38 in the morning. She walked over from the stone next to me, having left a bouquet of fresh flowers that would surely freeze and die by the time she was gone. She left them anyway. She had come to remember someone she loved. I, no one in particular, at least no one dead anyway. The initial instinct to jerk my hand from a stranger’s grip was quickly defeated by the desperate urge to be acknowledged. Crisp November air pinched my throat with my puzzled inhale. Maybe today I’d humour this woman and my own escapist fantasies. 

“Who are you here for?” she asked, kind eyes flickering up to mine. 

“Oh, um, no one really.”  

A clear lie. There was heaviness in my chest that threatened to pull the grief from my throat. I yearned to pull someone, anyone, into my lonely orbit. My fingers tingled with an electric longing to squeeze the frustration I had come here with into her. My thumb strayed to rub the bare skin I had twisted my wedding ring from that morning. I stayed silent. 

“Well, I’m here for my grandma. As of today, it’s been a whole five years.” she paused, turning her gaze back to her grandmother’s grave for a moment and pulling up her knitted scarf to wipe her nose, “Cancer’s a bitch.” 

“Shit,” I mumbled. 

She inched closer to me, “Yeah, not the most glamourous of deaths. I think she wanted to get into a bomb-defusing accident, you know,” her eyes softened, and she gave a sharp, amused exhale from her nose, “go out with a bang.” 

My laughter surprised me, “That’s good. Was she funny?” 

She shined a triumphant smile at me. “Clever as a fox, that woman. I miss that the most.” 

My god. There was this sudden brightness under her skin that I hadn’t seen before. This woman could part skies with her wit. I turned to face her, hand still in her woolen grasp and gently said, “I’m Este.” 

“Taylor,” she replied. 

…  

Three weeks of meeting behind the willow at the graveyard passed by before she kissed me for the first time. It was another two months before I told her I was married. I took her up to the cottage by the lakes and, hands trembling, confessed under the kitchen light on the very last night. We had just come in from a walk by the frozen water. The fire in the hearth still danced, though it looked like it would turn to embers soon. She made a beeline to the hearth, tossed in a new log, and then bounced to the kitchen as though the fire had lent her some of its newfound energy. No, she was the fire. Warm, lively, I needed her to survive. Shit. I wanted to preserve this moment, preserve her in a still image so I could never leave it. But I couldn’t keep lying to her; she deserved honesty from me.

She was stirring cocoa powder into a pot of milk when I pulled her from the stove, turned her hand upward, and placed my wedding ring in the centre of her palm.  

She looked at her palm in shock, then back up into my eyes. “Este,” she smiled in disbelief, “what the fuck is this?”  

Her whispered words fell through clenched teeth like sand through fingers. I thought I was going to throw up. The back of my throat tensed in a desperate attempt to hold back a sob. 

“God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”  

She blinked in confusion, then in steely understanding. Wiping the anger that welled in her eyes, she left with my ring clenched in her fist. Twenty minutes felt like twenty years as I sat on the tiled floor waiting for her to come back to me. I smelled the milk burning, and just as I got up to scrape the pot, she walked back in. After the initial shock had worn off, she seemed to have good sense to ask, “Fuck, Este…First, tell me one thing. Whose fucking house is this?” 

I rushed to answer, “Ours. Well, his grandma left it to him in the will, but really I’m the only one who comes up anymore.” I admitted. I felt my stomach heave. Then, in a selfish plea to win back some favour, I spat out, “But he won’t find us here.” 

She breathed out a soft “Oh.” Drawing back her shoulders and straightening her neck she quietly asked, “Who else have you brought here with you?” 

I was struck by her resigned tone. I had expected her to scream and throw the nearest ceramic at me. It’s strange, but when I realized that her reaction was not going to be violent, relief folded itself into gratitude, and gratitude into love. She wasn’t going to hurt me. I felt that she was preparing for disappointment, not anger.  I scrambled to reassure her, “No one else. I swear. It’s only ever been you.” 

A shaky exhale. A drop of the battle stance. She believed me. She placed the ring back in my hand and closed my fingers around it, as if signaling to me that my past was mine. Good. She didn’t belong there with all the mess. 

“This,” she squeezed my closed fist, “is none of my goddamned business. Understood?” 

I nodded, “I just thought you should know.” 

“I know, I know.” 

She held me with such soft tenderness that I thought I might shatter. Our love affair may have been nascent, but it was the only thing that had made me feel alive in seven years. She willed joy into existence; creation was hers to command. I would swear to anybody’s god that there was magic in her soul.  

Her hair glowed in the dim kitchen light like a nymph’s in the incandescence. Every passing moment in her arms felt like a year’s worth of new growth. 

She would ruin me, and I would let her. 

 …

He had one elbow against the doorframe while the other gestured erratically around his head. I kept my eyes trained on the crystal glass in his hand. Pungent whiskey sloshed up the sides as he detailed his firm’s newest acquisition with fiery passion. Taylor sat atop the dark wooden stool at the kitchen island, perched like an eagle watching for field mice. She looked like she was waiting for a reason to dive into the tall grass.  

As we smiled and nodded the evening away, liquor permeated our breaths and our thoughts. His glass, now empty and replaced by a lit cigar, sat alone back at the oak table. He seemed calmer. I felt walls melt with each sip, and some magnetic force pulled me closer to Taylor through the evening’s hours until I hopped up to sit on the cold white marble of the kitchen island. I turned to look at her, and the edges of her eyes creased with her soft smile. I smiled back, feeling her arm draped on my thigh like a woolen blanket, then turned back to my husband.  

He had stiffened. Despite his slightly slurred speech, his senses had stayed sharp enough to notice for the first time in the entire night how close to Taylor I had stayed. His gaze seared into the touch of her elbow resting on the hem of my dress, then up to meet my gaze. My hand crept down to push her off of me, but the fire did not leave his eyes.  

When Taylor left for the night, the house fell into tense silence. The only sound that echoed through our halls was the clicking of his lighter. His thumb played with the flame, on, off, on, off, until we went to bed without a word. 

Lying at opposite edges of our king-sized bed (he insisted on the luxury, and I reveled in the widened distance between us) and facing opposite walls, I wondered what could possibly have tempted Taylor into dinner and drinks under the roof that housed the man she took the place of. I wondered what lust for danger tempted her into the arms of a woman. A married one, no less. I had pulled hair out of my scalp trying to scrape my mother’s doctrine from my mind, but Taylor never budged in her belief that she did not make a choice or a mistake in loving women. There was a brilliant kind of courage to her, one that she wielded like a sword, and I dreamed of wearing like armour someday. Loving her felt like freefalling over a cliff; the wind muffles everything but the adrenaline. I knew I was probably rushing toward disaster, but until then I would bask in electric passion. We both risked much more than being accused of adultery in being with each other because cheating they could forgive. What we had would have us smeared with the red paint of shame and sin, but the bottom of the canyon hadn’t crushed our bones yet. 

When her eyes glance across the room to whisper a silent thought, I think that maybe two women on their own could make it. Or maybe we would go down in flames. And if we do, I know that in the ashes of that self-made fire, we could build a new house that stands long enough for ivy to grow over the windows.