Ben had fallen into a habit this season of trying to spend as much time as he could out of the house, so as not to unnecessarily test the uneasy peace that he and Melody had achieved. He was aware that this was the opposite of what most men with heavily pregnant wives might be doing, and he felt guilty about it, but not enough to stop. At least there was no need to keep up the illusion that they were madly in love. They'd made it through the first year of their marriage without anyone speculating that anything untoward had happened at the beginning of it, and now no one was likely to cast aspersions on something that was so far in the past. After the Witch Weekly article earlier that year, it was unlikely that anyone still really thought they were in love, anyway. Might as well let the charade slip a bit if it kept things smoothed over at home.

As such, he'd been out that evening. With his job being what it was, it was easy to find excuses: parties, festivals, events. Networking and making connections was part of his job, so he could reasonably claim that he had to go even when Melody wasn't feeling up for things. He'd only returned about an hour ago. He'd changed into his night clothes, but the party he'd been at tonight had run out of food midway through (a terrible faux pas that Witch Weekly would likely have been writing up the next day if their writers weren't currently on strike) and he was hungry. Their cook was long since gone for the day, but Ben had spent years as a cursebreaker cooking his own meals over rudimentary camp fires; he was more than capable of fixing something up. Just when he'd gotten the fire on the stove lit, Melody appeared in the doorway.

"Oh," he said, surprised to see her and taking a moment to figure out what else to say. "It's — fine. It's not that late, really."

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