Patty used to be beautiful, too. At her thinnest, in college, she was 109 pounds, nearly a whole fourth-grader less than she was now. Her delicate nose and short, feathery hair had given her a gamine look that she cherished, sometimes turning and smiling in front of the mirror for so long she’d be late to class. She did not take this body for granted. She ran five miles every morning—a warm-up run for Bryan—down to the community lake and back, so that on weekends she could slip more easily into silky dresses and go dancing in the Power and Light District with her friends—most of whom now had long since married and moved away from Kansas, closer to mountains or water.

That was all before she met Bryan—while trying on running shoes at REI—before she fell into him like a helpless child down a well, going and going through all that cool darkness without recognition or panic. It was also before she caught him downtown, on the five-year anniversary of their first date, eating gelato and playing a serious game of footsie with the mousy waitress who worked mornings at their favorite brunch spot, Café Bonita. Annette was her name, as if even her parents knew she would grow up and trap other people’s boyfriends. This was before Patty forgave Bryan once, and then again, and then a third time, all the while nursing her aching heart with cheese cubes and crusty baguettes and bar after bar of Peruvian dark chocolate. Instead of her usual breakfast of espresso and ice water, she took to eating stacks of French toast or glazed donuts, buttered bagels and cranberry muffins the size of softballs. She would find sugar underneath her nails. Crumbs in her bra. Meanwhile, she began sleepwalking. She would wake in the kitchen with a hand full of croutons, peanut butter in her hair.

Aside from losing Bryan, giving up her clothes had been the worst. Who knew that they mattered so much? Before, nothing looked bad on her. Once, after polishing a set of her mother’s silverware, she’d forgotten to take a salmon-colored terrycloth rag out of the back pocket of her jeans. Afterward, while walking downtown, she overheard someone say, “I read about that in Vogue the other day. Terrycloth is so in.” Now she found herself forced into plus sizes, the tags reading 2x and 3x to avoid the suggestion of pornography: xxx. Depressing. All of it was depressing.

It was June now and she’d been living with Kurt for nearly a month, not wanting to commit to a place of her own, lest Bryan change his mind and invite her back. She missed their house in Westport. It was, after all, the one she had demanded after many aggravating weeks of house hunting. Lots of light and built-ins, a little reading nook and a swinging porch out back by the garden. Not too far from the grocery store or the library. But he was right: he could afford the mortgage, she could not. She had lost her job at the radio station when she could no longer stop crying on the air. What money she had was Bryan’s, given to her out of the kindness of his heart. He did not want to see her struggle. To see her struggle would hurt him. She understood that the real purpose of the money was to alleviate his guilt.