“Could you bring me the aspirin, Henry?” she said. “And a glass of water?”

He stood by the coffee table and watched her. He would never be able to erase it from his mind. How she’d been with him. How she’d bellowed like an animal. She looked up, pulling her hands down her face, making basset-hound eyes.

“Henry, please. Aspirin.”

“Don’t you think we need to talk?” he said.

She hid her face again and sighed. “Oh God,” she said. “I can’t, Henry. I don’t have the strength for this right now.”

“You don’t have the strength?” He was trembling. Everything about her—her tone of voice, her posture, her whole physical being—it stabbed into him and wrenched his insides. “I don’t care if you don’t have the strength.”

She gave him a dark look.

“Effie,” he said. “How … how are you not—dying of shame right now?”

“How am I?” she cried, slapping her hand to her chest. And then she bolted up from the couch and strode past him. “I’ll get the fucking aspirin myself.”

He followed her through the dining room, calling her name, and stood at the bar counter while she went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. “Effie, you don’t talk to me like that. Do you hear me? Look at me, goddammit.” But she didn’t look at him. She took down a glass and began filling it at the tap. “Effie, do you hear me? I’m trying to talk to you. We have to talk about this.”

She turned the tap off and spun to face him, water sloshing out of the glass, and cried, “What do you want me to say?” And for a second he couldn’t speak. Did she really think there was nothing to say?

“Do you even remember?” he said. “Or are you going to tell me you were too drunk?”

“I remember,” she said, turning away from him again. “Jesus, Henry, of course I remember.”

“Because I remember,” he said. “I can remember every fucking detail.”

She opened another cupboard and took down the bottle of aspirin, and he watched as she poured a small pile of the pills into her palm, threw them all at once into her mouth, and guzzled the water down.

“I keep seeing you with him,” he said. “I see you and it makes me sick to my stomach, Effie. How you acted with him. I’ll never get it out of my mind.”

She set the glass down and bowed her head, and when she spoke, her voice was weak. “You were doing it too, Henry.”

“How would you know?”

She glared incredulously at him, her eyes welling with tears. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You never looked at me,” he said. “You never once looked at me.”