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“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. I got hold of his shirt.”

“Delaney.”

“It got extremely out of hand, and I want it understood that I was not a passenger in it, and then Iris opened her door three inches and asked whether it was morning, and that man had to tell his daughter I’d gone home while I was still sitting on his counter.”

The silence on Maren’s end ran long. “So you’re together,” she said.

“No. Nobody said one word about what it is. He said he wanted me. I nearly got his shirt off in a kitchen. Then I picked up a dish towel and put it down and picked it up again like a lunatic and went through my own door and lay in bed across the house from him until four in the morning.” I put my forehead on the wheel. “Maren. I don’t know what I am.”

“You are a woman who has been very badly interrupted.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It was not meant to comfort you. It was meant to be accurate. Are you going to make him say it?”

“Say what?”

“Any of it. A word. A shape. Something with a name on it.”

“I’m not going to make that man do anything,” I said, “and I think that’s the part I should probably examine.” I let my head fall back against the seat. “Maren. Don’t tell Ryan.”

She didn’t answer fast enough, and she didn’t say yes.

“Maren.”

“I can’t promise that.” She said it gently, which was worse. “I tell Ryan things. That is the arrangement, and it isn’t a flaw in the system, it is the system, and it’s the reason I’m any good to you at all. He won’t say a word to Eli, or to anybody else. He’ll know by tonight regardless, because I’m going to be in a room with him and my face does what it wants.”

I sat in a preschool parking lot with the vents blowing on my face, and I’d known the answer before I asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Just so we’re clear, this makes you a terrible friend and an excellent partner and I resent both of those things equally.”

“There she is,” Maren said, delighted.

He texted me late that morning, right around when practice would have let out.

Eli: .

That was all of it. He’d sent a single period. He’d have been sitting at his stall with one glove off, putting one character into a phone before he took anything else off.

I sat down on the arm of the couch and read it again and again. It was a period. I was a grown woman sitting on the arm of a couch with my thighs pressed together over punctuation.

Me: .

I sent it back. I’d conducted relationships with less in them than those two periods.

Book club came around and I was useless. We were on the one about the sisters and the house, which I’d read cover to cover and couldn’t have produced the name of either sister under threat. The sofa was low and soft and it put my knees up higher than my hips. I sat on the end of it with a glass of wine I didn’t drink and thought about a man’s hand on the side of my face and his thumb along my cheekbone, and the inch my mouth had stopped short of the inside of his wrist, and the fact that he hadn’t closed it. I crossed my legs, and then uncrossed them, and then crossed them the other way.

“Delaney,” Patricia said. “You’ve gone.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re not.”

“I’m having a busy week.”

Maren, across the room, didn’t look up from her wine. She had the glass against her bottom lip and left it there, and I had never loved and hated a woman so thoroughly at one time.