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“You’re in an amorous mood.”
     
         “I guess I am,” he said. When she didn’t say anything, he added, “But I guess you aren’t.”
     
         She wasn’t, she seldom was and it was the only conflict between them. It wasn’t that he wasn’t handsome. As an artist she had an extreme appreciation for his rugged good looks and long lean athlete’s body, with muscles sculpted from years of running. It was rather who he wasn’t , not who he was. She had often hurt him in her responses to his desire for physical intimacy and she had no wish to do that on this particular evening so she said, half joking, “Go ahead, anyway, have your way with me and get it over with.”
     
         Evan rolled away from her and looked up at the ceiling. “Ouch. When you put it like that you certainly killed any romance.”
     
         She moved closer to him. “Evan,”
     
         He said softly, “Why can’t you love me, Mary Katherine?”
     
         “But I do Evan. How can you doubt how much I love you?”
     
         He looked at her with an extreme sadness in his ice blue eyes that she hated to admit she recognized all too well and smiled slightly. “I know you do. You just don’t love me in all the ways I want you to. You love me as a best friend or the way you would love children if you’d ever agreed to let us have any.”          
     
         “You know why.”
     
        “I know what you told me. But the reason-the person- you keep hanging onto died a long time ago Mary Katherine. I’ve spent a lot of years waiting for you to let go.”
     
         She lay down next to him and was relieved when he put his arms around her. “ I’m not sure I will ever be able to do that.”
     
         He sighed. “So what do I do, darlin’?  Spend the rest of my life wishing for more?”
     
         She said, “I guess you can pray about it.”
     
         “Sometimes Mary Katherine, that’s the only way I can handle this part of our relationship. And I really wish you wouldn’t joke about prayer and things related to faith.”
     
         “You knew I didn’t believe the same things you do when we got married.”
     
         “I’ve never asked you to. I wish you did, but I’ve never forced that on you.”
     
         “You haven’t. You’ve always been very quiet about that. I don’t know what to say about the rest, Evan. If I thought things could be different, they would have been. Something inside me just died when Harry did. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
     
         Evan reached over and turned off the light. They were both silent. They had learned over the years to be quiet when this topic came up because if not a huge argument could erupt and neither of them ever wanted to fight with the other. Mary Katherine reached up to touch Evan’s face and found it wet with tears.  “I’m sorry Evan.”
     
         “I know.” He kissed her. “Goodnight.” He kept holding her and they were both silent again. After a while she could tell by his breathing that he had fallen asleep. She lay awake, thinking back to her first meeting with Evan, in the ER after she had sprained her wrist. He’d flirted with her as he wrapped it up and then, in what she later learned an uncharacteristic move, asked her out to dinner. She had surprised herself by saying yes. The dinner was good, the conversation even better. He entertained her with stories of strange ER patients and shared about his days training to run in the Olympics. She talked about her artwork. That dinner led to more dates and a marriage proposal and Mary Katherine had been so hopeful that Evan could erase the memory of the love she had lost her sophomore year in college.
     
         Harry Thurston had been the love of her life from the time she was fifteen years old. By the time she’d become engaged to him it had turned from a sweet high school romance into a deeply passionate and