“Of course,” Gabe says, looking wary.

“He’s been texting your sister?”

Gabe nods. “Thinks she’s amazing—which she is—but I know his type.”

“Oh?” I ask.

“Models,” Gabe says. “Young actresses. He was flirting with Lauren when she came to visit, but hooking up with Jeanine the rest of the time.”

Jeanine Watterson was the actress who had played Liz. She was probably twenty-five.

“I know,” Gabe says. “It’s none of my business.”

“I suppose you know better than anyone how us everyday folk need to be protected from the big, bad movie stars,” I say.

“If anyone in this room needs protecting,” Gabe says, “I don’t think it’s you.”

I give him a look. He gives it right back.

We sit there, in the quiet dining room, listening to the muffled sound of conversation coming from upstairs, or the other side of the house. It’s hard to tell. Grandmother. Mother. Daughter.

“Well,” Gabe says. “You do know how to clear a room.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“I think dinner is over,” he says.

“I think you’re right,” I say.

THE JAM—NEWSLETTER

EXPAT

RELATIONSHIPS ARE LIKE COUNTRIES. FRIENDSHIPS, families, marriages. Any deep, meaningful relationship tends to form its own customs. Its own language.

I was married for longer than I should have been. The country I founded with my husband was full of inside jokes, of little unseen intimacies, of shared habits. We had our morning routine down pat.

He was always up first. He liked to write in the morning and I liked to sleep in. He’d get up before the sun, head to his office by way of creaky floorboards, and work for hours on his typewriter. That sound—the squeaking of steps, the metallic clink of keys—made its way into my early-morning dreams more often than not. Sometimes it was images of tiny mice hammering away at a tiny ore mine. Sometimes it was my grandfather on a rocking chair he never owned on a porch he never sat on.

We’d eat breakfast together. He’d tell me what he’d written, and I’d tell him the dream it inspired. Once in a while my dreams would make it into his work. A character in a short story, a lithe, innocent young thing (there are always lithe, innocent young things in his fiction), took mushrooms with the charming professor she admired so much, and hallucinated a row of hedgehogs tap-dancing unevenly.

I liked seeing my dreams in his work. I found it strangely thrilling to see them in literary magazines, just as it’s almost more exciting to find my name listed in the acknowledgments than to hold my own book in my hands.

My husband thanked me in his first novel. Called me “his muse.”

I doubt I’ll get a mention in his second one. The one that will be dedicated to his soon-to-be second wife.