What happened to Seth and me changed everything. Everything. And yet it began with a completely innocuous question: Where are we going to put the couch?

As a romantic I wish it had started with Seth coming to me and looking into my eyes and saying how he needed to share something with me, something deeply personal and disturbing, so I could help him, walk beside him, stand behind him. You know—be every preposition a woman can be to her man. If I'd found out that way, the whole thing might have unfolded differently. More like a bolt of silk.

Instead it reeled off slowly and painfully like a spool of barbed wire.

We were standing in the empty living room of our townhouse, Seth and I. Actually it was still technically Seth's townhouse for twenty-one more days. As soon as we could get to the bank after we exchanged I dos, then it would be ours.

Ours was at that point among my favorite words—right up there with scathing and translucent and feckless. You don't earn a master's degree in literary criticism without befriending your vocabulary. The simple word ours breathed from me like Jane Austen prose.

As I said, we were standing there, both of us in our bare feet on the heart-of-pine floor. Seth had the tape measure. I had the dimensions for the couch we'd ordered written on a slip of good stock parchment paper with Tara Grissom printed in burgundy at the top in Lucida typeface. Even though I was still Tara Faulkner, a whole set of matching notepads, sticky notes, note cards, envelopes, and shopping lists had arrived from Grand Mary two weeks before, so I could get used to seeing my new name. Little did my grandmother know I'd been writing it on notebooks, textbook covers, and just about any other surface I could put a pen to since I was fifteen years old. But I digress.

"It'll fit," Seth said.

"I know it'll fit," I said. "But will it look right? I mean with the end tables and the coffee table and two chairs? I was going more for casual elegance—not doctor's office waiting room."

Seth put his hands on hips no wider than a snake's and smiled until the almost-dimples almost appeared just above his dark beard. "You have absolutely no sense of spatial relations whatsoever, do you, Tar?"

"I don't even know what that is."

"Okay ..." Seth went to the wall we'd just measured seven times and stretched out against it on the floor. On the floor in a starched white Oxford shirt and pressed jeans.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"I'm six-two. How long is that couch again?"

"If I have no spatial relationships—"

"Relations."

"Then you have no memory. It's eighty-six inches including the arms."

Seth stretched his over his head. "I'm the couch."

He was nothing like a couch. Six-pack abs. Cut pecs. Ripped everything that was supposed to be ripped. Seth was the exact opposite of a couch.

"Picture an end table at my head and one at my feet."

I dove for him and planted what we in the South call my fanny on his belly and lounged. "Cute," I said, "but not very comfortable."

He rolled out from under me and came up on one elbow, dark eyes twinkling. If I were critiquing a piece that had his eyes twinkled in it, I'd comment about cliché. But his actually did. They were right up there with the proverbial little star we all wonder about in song as toddlers. He gave one of my long curls a signature tug and twirled it around his finger.

"We'll figure it out when they deliver it," he said. "What else are they bringing besides the living room furniture?" Another tug. "Or do I even want to know?"

My turn to twinkle, although my eyes—blue—tend to ponder rather than sparkle. Or so I was told by a street artist on the Parisian Left Bank when I was thirteen. I've hung on to that description ever since.

"Bookcases and a desk and a big ol' comfy chair," I said.

"For?"

"The study?"

Seth eased his fingers into an entire hunk of my mop. "What study?"

"Mine?"

"Did we decide on that?"

I poked at a dimple. "Like I said, you have no memory. Or maybe it's just selective."

"Uh-huh." Seth gave me a quick kiss and vaulted to his feet. A long-fingered hand reached down for me, but I batted it away and untangled myself.

He headed for the kitchen. "What did you bring me?"

"That was a total non sequitur," I said.

Feet padding on the still-rugless hardwood, I trailed him between the french doors and through the vacant, large-windowed dining room and tried to get to the Tupperware container on the kitchen island before he did, but he slid it off the granite countertop and put it behind him in one smooth move.

I took a second to savor that countertop: vanilla cream with flecks of gold and chocolate and cranberry. Seth's mother said it wasn't practical. Mine said it was a dream. What mattered was that it picked up the brass in the pot hanger over my head where the All-Clad sauté and saucepans were going to hang.

"Cookies," Seth said. He peeled up a corner of the lid and sniffed. "Madeline make these?"

"I am so insulted right now. No, my mother did not make these. I did. They're dulce de leche."

Seth grinned. "Sounds more like a cocktail."

"I can always take them home," I said. "Kellen'll eat them."

But Seth already had half of one in his mouth. His eyes closed as he chewed and a soft moan furred from his throat. Seth always had the right response. He didn't even have to mean it and it still worked.

"You having one?" he said. An oatmeal-colored crumb escaped and rested on his lower lip. Lucky crumb.

"Uh, no," I said. "My last fitting's tomorrow and I have to be able to zip that dress. You're going to want milk with that."

"The dress?"

I opened the refrigerator. "Don't you have any real milk?" I'm seeing Almond Silk ... Rice Dream ... organic soy. "You obviously just made a Brighter Day run."

"Cow's milk is for baby cows," he said, mouth still stuffed.

"So ... isn't soy milk for baby beans? Sproutlets? How do they get milk out of a bean anyway?"

I closed the fridge and turned to Seth. He was biting into cookie number two.

"You're eating another one?" I pressed my hand to my chest, feigning shock. "Look out, now, darlin'—you won't fit into that tux."

Seth's mouth stilled in mid-bite. The air in the kitchen went abruptly testy.

"What does that mean?" he said.

I laughed. He didn't. There wasn't a twinkle within a Savannah city block.

"I was joking," I said.

"Were you?"

"For the love of the land, Seth, you could probably eat the whole dozen and still not gain an ounce." I wrinkled my nose at him. "Not that you couldn't stand to."

Seth's eyes deadened as if someone had pulled the plug on them, and he pushed the container away. It bounced nervously against the umber Southern Pottery jar that held a bouquet of virgin wooden spoons. He spread his hands and looked down at his waspish waist. "Is this a problem?"

"What? Your body?" I could feel my eyebrows intersecting over my nose. "You're kidding, right?"

"Are you?"

"I said I was."

It was getting weird. As in, this kind of stupid bickering never happened between us and I had no idea what to do with it. I just stood there staring at him in the sudden silence. The...