One evening, in the twentieth month, Samuel asked her to marry him. It was not a formal proposal in the sense that he had been planning it for weeks. It was not a production. It was just a question, asked over dinner at their restaurant, with the candles flickering between them and the garlic bread growing cold on their plates. They had been talking about nothing in particular. The new resident at the shelter—a young man with a dog, who had been sleeping in his car for three weeks. The book sh...