I went to the door. I thought I wouldn’t. I thought I might just fall to the floor in the kitchen and wait for it to be M, wait for him to walk through the door and find me. But it wasn’t M. I walked to the door and pressed my cheek against it. I pressed my cheek up close to the wood but wasn’t able to make myself look through the peephole. My heart really was beating so fast and my head was beginning to buzz, blood rushing in, rushing out. Here I was in the quiet so quiet midnight dark alone. This was the thing that would happen. The terrible thing.

The sounds drifted away but I stood there with my cheek to the door, with my hand on the handle for a long time, until light began poking through the metal storm shutters in the kitchen window. I stood there that long, though it was possible that I drifted in and out of sleep.

In the morning I felt stupid, finding myself standing there at the door. Believing something, being afraid of it. Thank goodness for morning and things to do. Dawn washes away so many ridiculous things, all suds and soap bubbles and light.

M had been away all night and hadn’t told me. He hadn’t come back for even a moment or I would have known it, standing like that, right behind the door. He hadn’t crawled into bed with me and I hadn’t been in bed. It felt like we had gone over something, M and me, without talking at all about it. It felt like some line or barrier had been crossed.

I made coffee and drank it standing by the small table in the kitchen, holding my eye right up to the shuttered window, peeking out between the slats. When E woke and wanted to roll the shades up, I would tell her no. I would tell her that today we were inside a submarine. That today was a day for pressing our eyes to peepholes and being silent like jellyfish or eels, a day for secrets, and double-hinging jaws. I would tell her something like that, when she got up. I set the table for breakfast in the wavy underwater light. In the corners of my eyes, I could see the kitchen begin to fill with sea creatures. They hung up by the ceiling pulsing and expectant, like extravagant plants.

B woke and I fed him on the sofa in his pyjamas, his feet kicking at my arms, his fingers opening and closing in that particular baby way. I tried to count how many days old he was, how many hours, how many minutes. We fell asleep I guess, or, we fell into some space together that wasn’t really awake, because when the door opened we both jumped. M walked into the room, wearing yesterday’s suit, scattering the jellyfish, the anemones, the watery squid from their coves, their hiding places, their cosy seaweed nests, scattering also the soft knocks and taps, the shadow steps, the whisperings and knockings that had been gathering and gathering in the apartment while I sat alone with B and closed my eyes. He’d taken his shoes off at the door so he stood in the living room in his socks, showing me his knobbly, getting-older feet.