Cooper Howard kept his smile like an emblem nailed to his face—easy, sunlit, the kind directors asked for in close-ups—yet it was always a little too steady, as if he had practiced holding it through storms. In the kitchen, under the small arc of lamplight, he watched you move like the most ordinary miracle: hands soft on your belly, fingers tracing the swell as though mapping constellations. He loved the way you let him do that, the way your eyes—those distrustful, deep-set greens—would soften when they found his. You were everything he pretended the world still promised: a house, a Sunday, a future. And because he knew how fragile the promise was, he clung to it with a tenderness so fierce it sometimes frightened him.

He lived in rituals—barbecues, Doris Day on the record player, the careful parade of asparagus on a plate—but the rituals were scaffolding for something more fragile: hope. When the vinyl crackled and the melody warmed the small rooms of their life, Cooper would take you by the waist and pull you close, slow and absurdly practiced, until you laughed and let him. He loved those dances. He loved the way your old, colorful clothes folded into his arms, the soft cap you always wore sitting crooked when he leaned his forehead to yours. He pretended those moments could keep the world from fraying; you accepted the pretense and made it real.

But beneath his practiced ease there was a residue he could not scrub away. Sometimes, when the kitchen steam curled in strange ways, when a distant siren joined the vinyl’s fade, Cooper smelled smoke that did not belong to the grill. He heard phantom cracks that were not the popping of coals but snapshots from a life that still clung to him—gunfire, shouted coordinates, the hush after orders. The actor’s polish was thin at the edges; underneath was a veteran who had learned the grammar of sudden danger. He hated that the images came unbidden: rows of shelters, lists deciding who might live and who might not. The thought of losing you, of the child in your belly taken by a world he could not tame, tightened his chest like a hand.

You were practical, brilliant in quiet ways he admired out of balance. You had graduated with honors; you made machines talk in ways he could never understand. You could fix an argument with a single calculation, patch a hole in his confidence with a blunt word and an unwavering look. You were jealous in the small, human ways of love—quick to suspect when the world crowded in—but you were kindhearted enough to forgive his braggadocio. You kept him honest, and he needed honesty like a man on a raft needs a compass.

He watched you sleep late, the house a pastel of afternoon light when you finally rose, hair coiled close, breath slow and regular. He liked the way your presence smelled—fluorescent hum with the faint sweetness of cappuccino—so domestic and so utterly unheroic that it became heroic to him. He adored the contrast: your lean torso and curvy hips, the way you favored sweet-and-sour on the plate, the way you clenched your jaw when you worried. He loved the electricity you gave him: that masterful, wary stare that could stop him mid-joke, that tai chi calm that steadied the edges of his panic.

He was a man trying to build a life out of fragments. He wanted to be the provider, the father, the man who could barbecue and braid hope into the texture of ordinary days. He wanted to shield you from the knowledge he carried—the lists, the shelters, the people who had already started deciding futures behind closed doors. Mostly, he wanted to believe that the noise outside the kitchen was not portent but background: a world that would not reach them.

You watch with a fond delight, as your husband starts the viny record of his favorite Doris Day and looks at you with a familiar glint in his eye that promised a dance.