I know her name: Gita. I know that she went to Cambridge before coming to Harvard as a postdoc. I even remember when Brian took her out to dinner with other colleagues to try to convince her to come to their physics program. Is she a good fit? I had asked. Do you think you can work with her?

The next time I heard of her was when Brian told me he had taken her out to lunch, because she didn’t seem to blend in with the other postdoc students. I thought it sounded exactly like Brian: kind to a fault, trying to circumvent a problem before it really started. Often, he was so wrapped up in his work he forgot to study interpersonal cues, and I thought that it was a positive step to care about a new recruit’s happiness. Then, a week later, Gita asked him to help her with car shopping. She had heard that it was easier for dealers to fleece a woman if she didn’t have a man there with her to kick the tires or ask about fuel efficiency. Brian had complained about it to me—I’m not here to babysit—but he had gone with her, and she rolled off the lot in a Toyota RAV4. A few weeks later he brought home a basket of Cadbury Flakes and Crunchies and Twirls and Rolos, a gift that made Meret burst into tears because she thought there was a subtext to receiving a bucket of candy. Gita brought it from England, he had said, truly bewildered. It was supposed to be a present.

But then he had agreed to go to Gita’s apartment after work to help her set up an air-conditioning unit. He did not remember that it was his daughter’s birthday, and that we were supposed to be having a celebratory dinner. Instead he followed Gita like a puppy to her place. He had stripped down to his undershirt and hauled the unit upstairs and settled it in the bedroom window as directed and, with characteristic thoroughness, had sealed it into place with plastic and duct tape so no bugs could come in through the cracks.

I sent him two texts: Where are you? and: Meret’s birthday??? He read them but responded to neither.

He came back into the living room to find Gita wrapped in his discarded dress shirt, sitting on the couch with a bottle of chilled champagne and two glasses. As a thank-you, she said.

Brian said he left immediately.

I believed him as he choked through this confession. I believed him, because had he actually taken Gita up on her offer, the guilt would have rolled off him in waves instead of just roses.

“Why didn’t you answer my texts?” I demanded.

“I was in the middle of putting in an air conditioner,” Brian said.

“Then why didn’t you answer them when you finished?”

He spread his hands, because he knew whatever he said was not going to come out right. “I’m sorry, Dawn. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

“I have to go,” I muttered.

“Go? Where?”

I rounded on him. “I don’t think you get to ask me that right now.” Even as I ran out the door, I could feel him tethering me, solid and immobile, like the weights that secure balloons at party stores, when all they want to do is rise.

* * *

—

THAT WAS THEN; this is now. We cannot go on coexisting in this house without negotiating a treaty of some kind. “I’m listening,” I say.

He threads his fingers through his thick hair. “I don’t know how to erase what happened.”

That passive construction. As if he was a bystander; as if he had no complicit role.

“I didn’t do anything with her,” Brian says. “I swear it.”

“If you didn’t do anything,” I repeat, “then why didn’t you tell me you were going to her apartment that day? Why ignore my texts?” I swallow. “Why act like you had something to hide?”

“Because I felt like an idiot when I realized I had forgotten Meret’s birthday.”

I stare at him. “Do you really think that’s why I left?”

He winces. “I thought…I thought I could be helpful. I didn’t know she wanted more than that. And I…I realize now that I should have.”

I believe this, too. Sometimes Brian is so literal that you have to hit him over the head to get him to understand a subtlety. But I also believe that he has a secret, one maybe that he hasn’t admitted to himself—that, faced with a beautiful girl and champagne and possibility, for one second, he had wished he was in a different timeline.

He may not have acted on it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a betrayal.

Brian’s shoulders are hunched; he bends closer to the table. It takes me a moment to understand that he is doing something I have never seen him do during the long tenure of our marriage.

He’s crying.

Brian has always been so steady and thoughtful and capable, the spool to my kite, the grounding to my electricity. When I literally had nowhere else to go in the world, he offered me his home. After I watch a patient die in front of me, I embrace him and remember how it feels to be alive. He’s consistently been able to save me. Until now.

To see him shaken and unsteady feels like the world is a little off-kilter, familiar but somehow wrong, like parting your hair on the opposite side. Something vibrates deep inside me, a note I recognize as pain. This is marriage, I realize. A tuning fork of emotion.

The muscle memory of our relationship has me moving out of my seat before my mind catches up. I stand in front of Brian and stroke his hair, because I can’t stand to see him hurting, even if the reason is because he hurt me.

He is out of his seat like a shot, grabbing on to the lifeline I am offering. And honestly, it is one. Life, as we know it for the past fifteen years, has been irrevocably altered by a young physicist’s attentions, and this is a hint of how to turn back time. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs, made from a thousand embraces just like this one. This is familiar ground.

There is a sense of completion in coming into the arms of the person who has held you for fifteen years, like rolling into the softest spot of the mattress or answering the last clue of the Sunday crossword. It’s heat from the fireplace filling the room. It’s the homing pigeon, spying its roost.

But there is also selective amnesia, a whitewashing, and even as my skin soothes to Brian’s touch, my mind is grasping at the smoke of the old argument that drove us apart.

I cannot help myself—I bury my face in the collar of his shirt and breathe in deeply. Soap. Starch. No roses. My eyes drift shut.

Then suddenly I snap upright. “Your speech.”

“Fuck the speech,” Brian says. “There’ll be another opportunity.”

I smile a little. “In another universe, you already gave it, and received thunderous applause.”

“In another universe, I got booed off the stage.”

I look at Brian’s eyes, spruce green darkening to black as he stares at me. As a scientist, he has never been good with words; but even in his silence I can map the trajectory of his thoughts. Brian’s mind works in kets, the little boxes that physicists use to talk about the quantum state of whatever is inside the brackets. Or in lay terms: the way a thing truly is—in this case, our marriage. “In another universe, we’re already naked,” I say.

Weeks later I will take this moment in time and I will turn it over in my mind like a snow globe. I will wonder why I said that, when guilt was still thick between us. Maybe I wanted to see if we could get close enough for there to be no room for blame. Or maybe, after all that has happened, instead of arguing over the past it was just easier to be flagrantly, viscerally in the now.

He stares at me, waiting—hoping—for absolution. For the knowledge that even though the last time we were together I couldn’t get away from him fast enough, I am back now.

I pull my shirt over my head.

Brian kisses me and takes over, tugging down my shorts. He catalogs every inch of me that he uncovers. Then he lifts me onto the kitchen counter and stands between my legs. I fumble with his belt, shove down his pants. His hands are parentheses on my hips, holding together a tumble of utterances: this, please, now. In one swift move he drags me forward, wrapping my legs around his waist as he pushes into me. His teeth scrape my neck; my nails brand him. He begins to move, but I won’t let him put any space between us, and we rise together like a chimera. He lets go at the same moment that I tighten around him, and when I remember where I am a moment later, it is because I can still feel the jump of his heartbeat inside me.

I find Brian staring down at me with a smug grin. “Well,” he says.

I laugh.