They had stripped the bedroom to bare walls and a mattress on the floor, drop cloths over the dresser and the chair, the room gone strange and roomy the way a house looks right before you live in it, or right after you've decided to live in it again.
Fourteen years married, and they were repainting the walls back to the color they'd been the week they moved in — a pale, chalky blue they had never chosen again, and had never said why they wanted it back.
He worked the ladder along the window wall while she went after the switch plate by the closet, unscrewing it slower than the job required, because the last coat had glued it shut at the edges and she liked prying things free.
The plate came away and there was pencil on the bare plaster underneath it, small, in his handwriting as it was then, rounder, gone soft where the old paint had nearly swallowed it.
A date. Their move-in date, the one that still lived on a card in her wallet.
And under the date, one word — the word she'd once asked him, half joking, half not, to put somewhere in the house, so it would still be true on the days they didn't say it out loud.
She had forgotten she'd asked. She had certainly forgotten he'd have done it.
She didn't call out. She just stood there with the plate loose in her hand until he noticed she'd stopped moving, and when he came down off the ladder and saw what she was looking at, something in his face came unstuck the same way the plate had, slow, at the edges.
He didn't explain it. There was nothing to explain; it had been there the whole time, under everything they'd painted over it since.
He crossed to her without a word, his thumb finding a streak of paint on her collarbone before it found anything else, wiping it half into her skin. The plate stayed in her hand. Her other hand went to his waist, under the open shirt, and stayed.
The wall went half back to blue that night, bare plaster left only in the one patch under the switch plate, with one word on it that neither of them said out loud. The roller sat in the tray by the door until morning, loaded and untouched.