George worked as an accountant in Millbrook. Quiet, methodical, dependable George Pierce. He wore the same kind of plaid shirts on weekends, kept his receipts paper-clipped by month, sharpened pencils with a pocketknife instead of using the electric sharpener I bought him because he claimed the electric one chewed the wood. If anyone in our small town had been asked to name the least complicated man they knew, George would have made the shortlist.
And yet three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—he left before sunrise and came home after dark.
“Going to the farm,” he would say.
The farmhouse belonged to his family. That was always the explanation. Old property. More land than it was worth, he said. Some inherited obligation too tangled to sell and too sentimental to walk away from. I asked to see it once, early in our marriage, the year we still believed curiosity was a simple thing and not a kind of trespass.
I had never forgotten the way his face changed.