She sat across from him at the table with her lipstick already on and her contacts in and the untouched coffee going cold in her mug, and he did not know how to answer when she looked up and wiped some water from her throat and said, “Ethan, what are you thinking?”

Later, as she left, as she stood and turned and slammed the door behind her, he raised his camera from the table as if snapping a picture could halt the moment, unbuckle it from its consequences, but she was gone already and the digital display just showed the door about to close, a shadow outside it holding a woman’s shape, leaving or coming in.

THAT NIGHT HE MET MALLORY at a bar when Samantha did not come home and he could not simply sit and wait for some confirmation of his building certainty that whatever life he’d imagined when he married her was on the threshold of vanishing. The Azul was a two-story throwback Cuban lounge with high vaulted ceilings, slow-turning fans, and a forty-foot mahogany and marble bar smuggled into New York piece by piece from the Havana Nacional Hotel. They sat beside a picture window on the second floor indoor balcony. Below them, rows of candles guttered on the empty bar and flickered in wide, lengthening refractions against the top-shelf liquors. In the far corner, a spotlight cast a purple circle on the bare stage.

“I can’t believe you called me,” Mallory said. “Don’t you have any other friends?”

She wasn’t looking at him, but out through the window at the moving storm.

“I guess I felt some need of your company,” Ethan said. “Your Midwestern optimism.”

She didn’t turn away from the window and he tried to stare at her, at the candle-glow on her round cheekbones, the gold flicker around her averted eyes. He tried to will her into meeting his gaze and she would not. Finally, he looked out, as she did, at the far horizon where thunderheads scudded in from the south like the lid of a tomb sliding shut. After the incident at the kitchen table Samantha left without her boots, and now the lights of the city pulsed and glowed on the clouds like heat lightning burnishing the edges of a building storm. It was a thing out of season, a typhoon dusk, a weird sky lit out of tropical latitudes of hurricane light.

“I’ve got no optimism these days,” she said. “I’m all plague and woe. I’m rewriting my dissertation.”

“I thought you were working on Chaucer? The Book of the Duchess? I thought you were writing about the white city on the hill?”

“It’s taken a turn,” Mallory said.