The morning of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary arrived unremarkably, the way most genuinely significant mornings eventually do once enough years have accumulated behind them — Lucien waking first, as he still generally did, to find Ezra already awake beside him, watching him with the same soft, unguarded warmth that had greeted countless mornings across their considerable shared history.

“Twenty-five years,” Ezra said, voice still rough with sleep. “I keep trying to properly absorb that number, and it keeps slipping away from me. Not from memory loss,” he added quickly, seeing Lucien’s brief flicker of concern. “Simply from the ordinary human difficulty of comprehending how much time has actually passed.”

“I...