She sinks into brief contentment, the kind of contentment she’s only ever found with him. They don’t make love—of course they don’t, impeded by decorum and formal wear—but for a number of reasons it may as well be the same thing. They’re two people bonded by something extraordinary: surviving a nuclear explosion or seeing the Beatles live—or just loneliness, loneliness at their respective outsets that colored everything else; or proximity, or passion; or hurting each other, or watching both their children leave the nest, or deciding to keep coming home to each other at the end of the day.
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