By dinner, I’d made some kind of order from household chaos. Rusty and I stood in the kitchen sipping white wine while he grilled steaks and I roasted asparagus and rice simmered. He told me about his clients and the assistant who lost the documents he needed for a meeting; how Sinclair Morris had been busted for embezzlement. He talked of gossip and conquest and common friends.

I dropped into the armchair in the sitting room, staring from the fireplace with the fake logs and the gas starter, to the oil painting of some hunting scene in England—a sport my husband does not do in a place we’ve never been—hanging over my mantel.

“I want to talk to you,” I said.

He sat next to me, turning on the TV and sipping his tumbler of whiskey. “Hmmm. Yes, darling?” But his eyes didn’t move from the TV, where he switched channels until he found the baseball game.

“How can you do this? How can you pretend we didn’t have a huge fight last night?”

He stared at me as if I were speaking another language. “Why drag last night’s fight into today like a dead animal?”

“It’s not a dead animal. You didn’t hear a word I said.”

“Yes, I did, Ellie. Why can’t you just let things go?”

“I don’t want to live this story,” I said.

He clicked a button on the channel changer so the TV was mute, although the game continued on the screen. “Live a story? What do you mean?” he asked, but his eyes wandered to the TV.

“I want to live a life with a heart and a soul and choices and characters and beautiful scenes. I don’t want to live in a pile of facts. Perfect, nicely lined-up facts—like my lists.”

“I don’t … get it.”

I took his hand. God, I wanted him to understand this. “Mother.” I took in a breath. “When she first started writing in her journal, she told stories. And then things didn’t go her way and she started giving the facts, started talking about only specific circumstances. That’s it. I think when we start telling the facts instead of the story … when we start living for the stuff and how it looks, we close our hearts.”

Rusty screwed up his face in confusion.

“She battled her heart and then she lost it. I do not want to do that.” I shook my head.

Rusty looked at the screen; saw that the Braves were losing. “Shit,” he said, and clicked the “off” button. Then he looked at me. “Okay, so you feel like you’ve come to some … understanding?”

“Yes.”