Emily got up and went into the kitchen. She pulled out the end of a baguette from the bread box and some cheese from the refrigerator and ate them both while looking into the bonus room. It was still a mess. She should clean it out, since she was home alone and it was barely eight p.m. What even was in there?

She hated the quiet of the apartment, so by force of habit she asked Alexa to play some jazz but then realized that was what Ezra liked best, not her, so she switched it to pop as she walked into the tiny, cluttered room. This was a good project for the night. She could feel accomplished, get something done.

Emily piled the items they’d gotten on their most recent trip to Costco in one corner, and already it looked neater. Then she found boxes of Ezra’s medical journals and her notebooks from her PsyD program and separated them into their own piles. She’d get some pretty boxes for them, something she could stack in the living room as an end table or something. There were some winter clothes in a big garbage bag, which Emily brought to the front door to donate to Goodwill the next day. She’d been meaning to do that for the last eight months, but somehow when things got put in that room, they stayed there, in limbo. It was basically purgatory, where objects waited for her or Ezra to send them to their proper place.

Emily checked her phone. Ezra hadn’t written her back.

There was a futon in the room that they’d planned to use when guests slept over, but the room had gotten so crapped up that no one had ever slept there. When Ari or her boys stayed the night, they pulled out the couch in the living room instead. Emily knelt down and looked under the futon. She found two wooden paddles and a ball that they’d used to play matkot at the beach over the summer. A Frisbee was there, too, and a croquet set that someone had given them for their wedding, possibly anticipating a move to the suburbs that hadn’t yet happened and that Emily hoped never would. There was a long black duffel bag under there, too. Emily tugged on it, immediately realizing what it was: her keyboard. In spite of everything, she’d never been able to get rid of it. When the movers brought it in, she just pointed them to the spot under the futon. Ezra hadn’t even seen it.

Emily remembered how it had felt to play at the fund-raiser at the Gregory Hotel—as if something wound tight inside her had loosened, as if she were finally doing the thing her body did best. She took a deep breath and unzipped the black case.