The private dinner that saved our marriage.

A reader wrote in about a booking she made after a year of small distances. She and her husband hadn't fought — that was the strange part. They had just stopped meeting each other in the room. Two people cohabiting a life, sharing a mortgage, raising two children, running out the clock on the version of them that used to touch each other's forearms mid-sentence.

She booked a chef for a Sunday night. Nothing to prepare. Nothing to clean. She didn't tell him. Just a stranger in their kitchen at 6pm and a table with two chairs, set with the plates they'd received as a wedding gift a decade earlier and had never once used.

'He came home,' she wrote, 'and stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a very long time. Not saying anything. Just watching a woman he'd never met slice an onion in his house. And then he laughed. Like he had forgotten how.'

'He looked at me across the salad course,' she wrote, 'and I remembered why I married him. Not what I loved about him — I have never forgotten that. But why. Which is different, and rarer, and easier to lose.'

'We didn't fix anything that night,' she added, at the end. 'We just remembered that we could still be surprised by each other. That was enough. That was almost everything.'

We asked her permission to print this. She said yes. She asked us to keep her name out.