In the morning, there is still the strip of light under the bathroom door. Alice has slept in the tub, using a balled up bath towel as a pillow. She tells him this as she sits across from him at the breakfast table. He has made her French toast, her favorite, but she refuses to eat. She is not hungry. There are purple bags beneath her eyes and she smells sour, like curdled milk. Still, Elliot wants to kiss her, to suck the bruise from her neck and into his own body, to have it settle into the muscle of his heart. He would endure this bruise forever if it meant the one on her neck would disappear.

“I can’t be here today,” she tells him.

He tries to stay calm. “Okay. But what about the apartment? They’re delivering the couch today.” This is a lie—the couch is not set to arrive for another couple of days, but for a moment he believes that the couch can save them. It is their most expensive purchase—a horrendous red sectional from Pottery Barn. It took them weeks to finally choose one. He’d wanted something dark and leather, but Alice said she would rather go back to living alone than have to look at leather every day. To prove her point, she started looking up studios on Craigslist. She went so far as to tour two apartments, one of which she rather liked, before Elliot finally gave in.

“I’m going out,” she says. “I’ll come home when I’m ready.”

He has no choice but to watch as she gathers her things. He is not the type to beg or make a fuss, a characteristic Alice has always faulted him for. She herself is quick to argue with others—family, friends, baristas, and bank tellers—and expects Elliot to back her up, even if he doesn’t agree with her point. Of course, it’s never about defending her point, but about defending her. “You’d sit back in the trenches and watch me get shot up,” Alice once told him, after a particularly bad argument she’d had with one of their mutual friends in which Elliot stood by, eating a plateful of miniature hotdogs. Elliot argued that he wouldn’t even be on the battlefield to begin with. He’d be off somewhere else—in a neutral country, like Sweden, eating cream puffs or watching a peace parade. She then compared him to the Germans who ignored the smell of smoke from the crematoriums. “You’d let millions of people die to avoid being bothered,” she’d said, emphasizing this last word—bothered.

Now, he follows her into their bedroom, where she packs a duffel bag with T-shirts and pajama pants and underwear. She then goes to the bathroom. He knows he is in trouble if she takes her shaving cream; she only shaves once a week, on Sunday nights. When she is finally packed and gone—out of the apartment without even a kiss good-bye—he inspects the bathroom. The shaving cream is gone, as is the shampoo and conditioner and the little contraption she uses to curl her eyelashes. Even the bath towel is missing.