The car sputters a little. It was the poorest car at Cogwheels, like a filthy hobo among the other guests’ shiny machines, silver and black in the valet lot. The place is unaffordable, but Ben Nickels—her husband, she married Ben Nickels of all people—had got himself a coupon for two free vacation nights at Cogwheels. There were strings attached—only certain days, food and beverage of course not included—but what was a honeymoon if not a vacation with strings attached? Ben and Rachel were married just three months before, and now the music system calls up a song and Ben turns to her and says, “Hey, we like this song,” we, their opinions locked together like the Electoral College. Oh, she loves him, but sheesh. He is so kind, generous, and very capable at work, with all the little devices and the legal snares they must avoid, and the only man who was properly but not showily horrified when she told him about Jeremy Tyber wrecking her in high school, but how could she tell him about the other shadow, floppy and eternal, that clop-clopped after her? A horse, get over it. But she isn’t over it, and she hasn’t told him.

She’s a fraud, a con artist. Ben thinks he has married Rachel as she has presented herself, a woman, smart and loyal, who through maintenance and worry is just over the midpoint, she estimates, of attractiveness among her female friends, whose work, at the office end of a noble but not whiny nonprofit, looks complementary, next to his bustling, rising tech gig. But he does not know that she, a hack charlatan, did not freely give herself to rolling around in a tent, that she, cranky from little sleep, agreed the view was beautiful, and the trees quiet, but offered no further conversation on the small, mapped hikes because she was haunted by a horse with a big floppy neck. If she had told him this, told anyone, she would die an old maid, a muttering spinster shutting the curtains against galloping phantoms. Look at him frowning a little, the car jittering behind a truck so large it has to warn everybody. If you can’t see my mirrors.

“Work tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t want this honeymoon to be over.”

“I know.”

“Let’s live there, in the tent.”

“Yes,” she says.

“You liked it?”

“Of course.”

“I was thinking maybe you didn’t like it.”

“No, no, with you I did.”

“I know it was a coupon.”

“No, no.”

“We could have splurged our credit cards on, I don’t know, Paris or something farther.”

“No, no. Ben.” Across the device she holds his hand a little, on the steering wheel making curves, then rests it on his leg. “It was so lovely.”

“Is it a horse? Is it because of a scary horse you saw as a child that you can’t quite love me right now?”