Free Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

sun was dipping below the horizon, as they had a decade before. “Slow down just a bit,” she’d told Jacob when they were about twenty minutes away. He thought she wanted to hear the rest of the podcast, which touched him, but shewanted to give him the same arrival they’d had last time, which would have touched him if he’d known.
    Jacob brought the car almost all the way into the parking space and left it in neutral. He turned off the stereo and looked at Julia, his wife, for a long time. Earth’s rotation brought the sun under the horizon, and the space fully under the car. It was dark: a decade of sunset.
    “Nothing has changed,” Jacob said, running his hand along the dry-stone wall as they walked the mossy path to the entrance. Jacob wondered, as he’d wondered ten years before, how the hell such a wall was made.
    “I remember everything but us,” Julia said with an audible laugh.
    They checked in, but before taking the duffel to the room, went to the fire and eased into the coma-inducing leather armchairs that they hadn’t remembered but then couldn’t stop remembering.
    “What did we drink when we sat here last time?” Jacob asked.
    “I actually remember,” Julia said, “because I was so surprised by your order. Rosé.”
    Jacob let out a hearty laugh and asked, “What’s wrong with rosé?”
    “Nothing,” Julia laughed. “It was just unexpected.”
    They ordered two glasses of rosé.
    They tried to remember everything about the first visit, every smallest detail: what was worn (what clothes, what jewelry), what was said when, what music was playing (if any), what was on the TV over the honesty bar, what complimentary appetizers were offered, what jokes Jacob told to impress her, what jokes Jacob told to deflect a conversation he didn’t want to have, what each had been thinking, who had the courage to nudge the still-new marriage onto the invisible bridge between where they were (which was thrilling, but untrustworthy) and where they wanted to be (which would be thrilling and trustworthy), across a chasm of so much potential hurt.
    They ran their hands along the rough-hewn banister of the stairs to the dining room and had a candlelit dinner, almost all the food sourced from the property.
    “I think it was on that trip that I explained why I don’t fold my glasses before putting them on the bedside table.”
    “I think you’re right.”
    Another glass of rosé.
    “Remember when you came back from the bathroom and it took you like twenty minutes to see the note I’d written in butter on your plate?”
    “ ‘You’re my butter half.’ ”
    “Yeah. I really choked. Sorry about that.”
    “If we’d been sitting closer to the fire, you might have been spared.”
    “Although hard to explain the puddle. Ah, well. Next time I’ll do butter.”
    “Next time is right now,” she said—an offering and a summoning.
    “And I’m supposed to just churn them out?” With a wink: “Churn?”
    “Yes, I get it.”
    “Your stoicism is a butter pill to swallow.”
    “So give me something good.”
    “I know what you’re thinking:
Bad butter puns, how dairy!
”
    That got a chuckle. She reflexively tried to withhold her laughter (not from him, but herself) and felt an unexpected desire to reach across the table and touch him.
    “What? You can’t believe it’s not better?”
    Another chuckle.
    “Butter precedes essence.”
    “That one I don’t get. What do you say we move on to bread puns, or maybe even dialogue?”
    “Have I milked it too much?”
    “Relent, Jacob.”
    “Who ya gonna call? Goat’s Butter!”
    “Best yet.
Definitely
the one to end it on.”
    “Just to clear the dairy air, I’m the funniest man you’ve ever known?”
    “Only because Benjy isn’t yet a man,” she said, but the combination of her husband’s overwhelming quickness and his overwhelming need to be loved brought waves of love, pulled her into its ocean.
    “Guns don’t kill people, people kill