He leans back on his hands, legs extended out in front of him, an entire theatre at his disposal.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asks.

I discover that Jeremy is right. About everything.

He had been drunk that night. He apologized afterward, said that he didn’t mean it, but we’d both known that after that point, our marriage was irreparably broken.

It was a party for his friend—in New York, practically everyone we knew was a friend of his—a brownstone gathering in Brooklyn to celebrate a book release. All the writers we knew were “serious” writers, who wrote “serious” books like Jeremy’s.

He’d been struggling to finish his second novel—the one that was already way overdue.

“These deadlines are creativity killers,” he always said. “They’re the reason I can’t write.”

He’d been working on it for years. I’d published dozens of articles by that point as well as my first collection and was working on my second.

“It’s not the same,” he would always say when I tried to encourage him to think of the deadlines as motivation.

He’d been in a sour mood all day. He didn’t want to go to the party.

“The book isn’t even good,” he’d said.

It was getting great reviews, and even though Jeremy’s book had gotten the same, he was jealous. He was convinced everyone else was getting the attention he deserved.

“You’ll get it when your next book comes out,” I’d said.

“That’s never going to happen,” he’d said. “I can’t just churn out words like you. Everything I write is carefully crafted.”

He said things like that a lot, and he had laughed when I told him I was thinking about writing fiction.

“Oh, you’re serious?” he’d said afterward. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think that was the kind of writing you could do.”

He’d laughed even harder when I told him what kind of books I wanted to write.

“I’m just being honest,” he’d said.

We’d arrived at the party and he’d gone straight to the open bar. Three whisky sodas later, he started getting rude, and I was trying to shepherd him out the door when the host cornered us, with a young woman with big glasses and red lipstick trailing behind him. She reminded me a little of myself when I was younger. Eager. Bold.

“A fan of yours,” the host said.

Jeremy had lit up.

“I love your work,” the young woman had said to me.

“Thank you,” I’d said.

“For fuck’s sake,” Jeremy had said.

We’d both turned to him, with different forms of surprise. He’d waved a drunken hand as if to say “carry on.”