It wasn’t a question.

And when I got back, he said. From the trip, I mean, I don’t know, he said.

Ask me to go to bed I thought, right now, feeling hotter and hotter, wishing the conversation would swing away from wherever it was going. Why were we still standing in the kitchen. Ask me to go to bed, I said urgently without moving, without moving my lips.

Something was off wasn’t it, M said. When I got back, I could feel it. There was something about the air in the apartment, it was so, I don’t know, so stale. What happened, he asked, while I was gone?

I took a breath and refused absolutely to remember any details about the way my hands shook during those days, about the feeling of flying and falling at the same time inside the apartment, about being unable to brush my teeth. Take me to bed I wanted to scream at him.

When I didn’t answer, M said, Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. He hugged me and kissed me on the shoulder and slipped the strap of my dress back up onto it. Anyway he said, about the present. Wait a second, he said, leaving me in the kitchen, spinning, trying to catch my breath.

M came back holding a long trench coat draped in his arms like a fainted woman or a bride. It was beautiful, soft camel, wide lapels. A double row of buttons just itching to be touched, to be done up, to be undone. The coat’s waist would touch exactly my waist.

My ankle slipped beneath me when I saw it. It was that much. With a coat like that around me, I could have been anyone underneath. It was a thing of myth. If I had been an armful of hay it could have spun me into gold. I almost fell but caught myself on the counter. For a moment the glass vase and I occupied exactly the same space, for a moment I was eye to eye with all the roses and it was unclear which one of us would fall. I recovered though and the vase slipped off the counter and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor. Water, roses, glass. A tiny flood. The little glass shards worming themselves into every corner of the kitchen as quick as that. Shards that could creep into E’s feet, B’s hands, all their tender so soft skin.

M left with the coat, to hang it up somewhere, and I dropped to my knees, sweeping, cleaning, wiping. Care had to be taken. M helped a bit and then went to bed, saying something about work in the morning. Saying, stop cleaning, it’s fine. Saying stop. Saying come to bed. I stayed in the kitchen, I needed to be sure everything was clean, ordered. When I was done I peeled off my dress, finally, finally, and threw it into the garbage bag with the glass, the roses. The expensive fabric floated in the bag for a moment rippling like moonlight on dark water, just pouring itself out under the black plastic sky, the glittering chipped glass stars.