The name slipped out of my mouth wrong on a Tuesday.

Nathan was talking about our anniversary, some restaurant reservation he wanted to change. "The place where I proposed," he said, like that would jog something loose in me.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

"The one on Christopher Street," he said, slower now, watching me the way you'd watch a glass wobble near the edge of a table.

"Right," I said. "That one."

I didn't know which one he meant. I still don't, writing this down. There's a hole where the name should be, clean-edged, like something scooped out with a spoon.

He didn't push. He just looked at me a beat too long, then went back to his phone.

The coffee thing happened three days later. I'd made it a thousand times. Black, two sugars, stirred clockwise because he said counterclockwise made it taste "off," which was ridiculous, but I'd stopped arguing about it years ago. That morning I handed him a mug and he stared into it like I'd handed him dirt.

"This is black," he said. "No sugar."

"Is it?" I looked at the mug too. It looked fine to me. "Sorry. I'll fix it."

"You've made my coffee every morning for seven years, Sloane."

I heard something in his voice. Not anger. Something thinner than anger.

"I guess I was thinking about something else," I said, and I fixed it, and he drank it without another word, but his eyes kept sliding to me over the rim of the mug like I was a word he couldn't spell anymore.

The Santorini photos came out that weekend. He'd pulled them up on the tablet, propped it against the fruit bowl while I made dinner. White buildings. Blue domes. A woman in a yellow dress laughing on a boat, sunburned across the nose.

"Remember this?" he said.

I looked at her for a long time. She looked happy. She looked like she belonged somewhere warm and easy.

"Where is this?" I asked.

He went very still. "Santorini. Our honeymoon. Sloane, that's you."

I tilted my head. It didn't feel like me. It felt like flipping through someone's vacation album at a garage sale, mildly pleasant, entirely unclaimed. "Pretty dress," I said, and went back to the stove.

Behind me, I heard him set the tablet down too hard.

He started staying out later after that. Lab work, he said. A grant deadline. I didn't ask questions, because questions require caring about the answer, and caring had started to feel like a language I used to speak fluently and now only half-remembered, the way you lose a language you learned as a child.

I was on the couch one night, scrolling through my phone with the television murmuring at me, when I saw the photo. A gala. String lights, a marble staircase, Nathan in a charcoal suit I didn't recognize, standing close beside a woman with sharp cheekbones and a dress the color of red wine.

**My favorite neuroscientist ☕**

The caption sat under the photo like a little dare.

I looked at the woman's face. Nothing in me reached for it. No sting, no ache, no name rising up to meet her. She was pretty. The lighting was good. Nathan looked handsome, the way he always did in photos, chin tucked slightly to hide the start of a double chin he was paranoid about.

I tapped the heart with my thumb, the same way I'd like a stranger's sunset or someone's dog in a sweater, and I kept scrolling.

Twenty minutes later, Nathan's phone rang in the kitchen. He picked it up fast, like he'd been waiting.

"Hey—" he started, and then his voice dropped into something clipped and low. I wasn't trying to listen. The apartment just carried sound that way, especially at night, especially when someone was trying not to be heard.

"Paloma. Paloma, calm down." A pause. "She what?" Another pause, longer. "No. No, I don't know why she— it doesn't mean anything, it's just a like, people like everything—"

His voice kept climbing and folding on itself. I caught the shape of his shoulders through the doorway, hunched over the counter, one hand pressed flat against his own forehead like he was checking for a fever.

"I have to go," he said finally, and hung up, and stood there a long moment before he noticed me watching from the couch.

"Everything okay?" I asked. It felt like the polite thing to say.

He looked at me the way you look at a door you're not sure is locked. "Fine," he said. "Lab stuff."

"Okay," I said, and turned back to the television, and I meant it. I really didn't care.

Somewhere underneath the not-caring, small and far away, I noticed that I used to. I just couldn't remember why.

The restaurant had candles on every table, small flames bending when the waiters walked by. Nathan picked it. Somewhere with white tablecloths and a wine list thick as a phone book. Our friends were already there when we arrived, Marnie and Todd from his department, a couple named the Hendersons who I think I liked once.

And Paloma.

She sat across from us, a glass of red in her hand, her dress the exact shade of Nathan's tie. I noticed that. I didn't know why I noticed that.

"Sloane." She smiled at me like we shared a secret. "You look wonderful. Nathan's been working himself to the bone lately. All those late nights at the lab. I keep telling him he needs to go home and rest."

I looked at her, waiting for something to land. Jealousy, maybe. A flicker of suspicion. Nothing came. She was just a woman with nice teeth talking about my husband's job.

"That's kind of you to worry about him," I said.

Her smile flattened for half a second before it came back, brighter, more brittle.

Nathan's hand found my knee under the table. I didn't know if it was meant to steady me or him.

Todd raised his glass a few minutes later, tapping it with his fork until the table quieted. "To Nathan and Sloane," he said, grinning. "Seven beautiful years."

Glasses lifted around the table. Candlelight caught in the wine, little flickers of red.

"Has it been seven?" I said.

I wasn't being funny. I was actually asking. The number sat in my mouth strange and unfamiliar, like a phone number I used to know and had let go of.

Nobody laughed. Marnie's smile froze halfway up her face. The Hendersons looked at each other. Paloma's glass stopped an inch from her lips.

"Sloane," Nathan said quietly, and I heard something crack open in his voice, thin as ice underfoot. "It's our anniversary."

"Right," I said. "Of course." I lifted my glass anyway, because it seemed like the thing to do, and the table drank, but the warmth had gone out of it. Conversation limped along after that, polite and careful, the way people talk around a hole in the floor.

I didn't feel embarrassed. I noticed everyone else did, on my behalf.

Beside me, Nathan's wine glass trembled. Just slightly. Enough that a thin red line ran down the side and pooled on the tablecloth, a small stain spreading like something guilty.

*

He started trying things after that.

Two nights later I was at the stove, stirring a pot of something, when music came on through the kitchen speaker. Piano, slow, a little sappy. I hummed along without thinking, the way you hum along to anything with a decent melody.

"You remember this?" Nathan was in the doorway, watching me too closely.

"Is it from a commercial?" I asked. "It sounds familiar."

His face did something I didn't have a name for. Like a door shutting on his own hand.

"It's our wedding song," he said.

"Oh." I turned the heat down under the pot. "It's pretty."

He didn't say anything else. He just stood there while I finished cooking, like he was waiting for me to remember something on my own, the way you wait for a kettle to boil even though you know exactly how long it takes.

The pasta came a few days after. He made it himself, which was strange, because Nathan didn't cook. He set the plate in front of me with a kind of ceremony, like he was presenting evidence.

"You taught me this," he said. "Our third date. You said your grandmother's recipe."

I took a bite. It was good. Garlic, a little too much oregano.

"This is really nice," I said. "You should make this more often."

Something in his shoulders dropped, like a rope going slack. "Sloane. You don't remember teaching me this."

"Should I?" I asked, and took another bite, because it really was good, and I didn't understand why he'd stopped eating his own plate to just watch me eat mine.

The flower came last. I found him standing at his desk one evening, a small wooden frame in his hands, something brown and paper-thin pressed under the glass.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked, holding it out to me.

I leaned in. A flower, long dried, its petals gone the color of tea. Delicate. Almost pretty in its brittleness.

"That's lovely," I said. "Where did you get it?"

He didn't answer right away. His jaw worked like he was chewing on something bitter.

"I gave it to you," he finally said. "Our first Valentine's Day. You pressed it yourself. You kept it in a book for two years before I had it framed."

"Huh." I touched the glass with one finger, careful, the way you touch something in a museum. "That's a nice story."

He took the frame back from me slowly, both hands, like he was afraid I'd drop something that had already been broken once. He didn't say anything else. He just stood there holding it, staring at the flower like it might tell him something the rest of us couldn't.

I went back to whatever I'd been doing before. I didn't think about it again that night.

I didn't think about it at all.

Nathan started humming in the shower.

I heard it through the bathroom door most mornings now, low and off-key, the same eight notes over and over. I didn't know the song. I didn't try to place it. I just heard it the way you hear a neighbor's television through a wall, present but not yours to think about.

He was drinking more, too. I noticed the level in the bottle on top of the fridge dropping faster than it used to, noticed the way his eyes had gone glassy and red-rimmed some mornings, like he hadn't slept, or hadn't slept well. He'd sit across from me at breakfast with his coffee going cold in front of him, just watching me eat toast like I was doing something remarkable.

"You okay?" I asked him once, buttering a second slice.

"Fine," he said, too fast. "You have jam on your—" He gestured vaguely at his own mouth.

I wiped it away. He kept watching me like I might disappear if he blinked.

I didn't understand the weight in his face. I didn't understand why he looked at me some mornings like I was a door closing very slowly, and he was standing on the wrong side of it. It wasn't unpleasant, exactly, being looked at that way. It was just confusing, the way it's confusing when a stranger cries in front of you on the subway. You want to help. You don't know how. You don't know them well enough to ask.

*

The knock came on a Wednesday afternoon, sharp and impatient, three raps in quick succession.

I opened the door to a woman in a camel coat that probably cost more than my first car. Sharp cheekbones. A face I recognized, vaguely, from somewhere—a photo, maybe, though I couldn't place the context. She looked like she'd rehearsed her own expression in a mirror.

"I'm sorry—do we have an appointment?" I asked.

Her mouth twitched. "You don't know who I am."

"Should I?" I asked, not unkindly. I really wanted to know. It felt like a pop quiz I hadn't studied for.

"I'm Paloma." She said it like the name should detonate something in me. When my face stayed pleasant and blank, something flickered behind her eyes—confusion, then a kind of panic she tried to smooth over with her chin lifted higher. "Paloma Salazar. Nathan's—" She stopped herself. Recalibrated. "I work with your husband."

"Oh, of course. Would you like to come in? Is this about the grant paperwork? He mentioned something about signatures."

"I'm not here about paperwork." Her voice sharpened, the practiced calm cracking at the edges. "I'm here because this has gone on long enough. I know this is hard to hear, but you need to let him go. Step aside. Gracefully, if you can manage it. He's chosen. We both know that. You clinging to a marriage that's already dead isn't dignified, Sloane, it's sad."

I considered her. I waited for something to rise in me—anger, hurt, the urge to defend territory I apparently owned. Nothing rose. It was like she was describing a war I hadn't been told I was fighting.

"I think you might have the wrong apartment," I said gently. "Or maybe the wrong day. I really don't know what you're talking about."

Her jaw dropped slightly. She recovered fast, chin tilting up, eyes narrowing like I was mocking her. "Don't do that. Don't play the wounded innocent. I've seen the way you liked my photo, like it was nothing to you. I know you're pretending not to care so you look strong, but everyone can see through it—"

"I really do have to get back to something," I said, and I meant it kindly, the way you'd interrupt a telemarketer who'd caught you at dinner. I stepped to the side and held the door open wider, an unmistakable gesture. "It was nice meeting you."

"You can't just—" Her voice cracked, high and thin, all her rehearsed lines collapsing out of order. "I drove forty minutes for this."

"I'm sorry to hear that." I was, genuinely, in the mild way you're sorry for any stranger's bad day. "Traffic's terrible this time of year."

She stood there a moment longer, coat cinched tight, mouth working like she was trying to find the thread of the speech she'd practiced in her car. Then she turned, heels sharp against the marble hallway, and left without another word. I closed the door softly behind her. No slam. No satisfaction in it. Just a door closing, the way doors do.

I walked back to the dining table where my tea had gone lukewarm and sat down. I opened my laptop.

The search bar blinked at me, patient. I typed: *divorce attorneys Manhattan family law.*

I didn't know, exactly, why I was doing it. There was no anger behind the decision, no wound driving my fingers across the keys. It felt less like grief and more like cleaning out a closet you'd been meaning to get to for months—an overdue task, practical, faintly satisfying once you finally started.

My hands did not shake. I scrolled through reviews, jotted two names on a notepad in handwriting so steady it surprised even me, and finished my tea before it went completely cold.