“Oh,” he said, and stared intently into the darkness. Jen knew he wouldn’t fight or lash out. He wouldn’t make a scene. He would take this moment and wrap it up and carry it home to ponder from a distance. He would call her the next day with opinions and a variety of interpretations. He would make lists. He would experience this, as he did everything, only in dreadful retrospect. Jen could see David’s past and future closing in tightly around him, disrupting his carefully maintained sense of not really being there at all.

She felt fine though. She watched him consolingly, caring enough to be gentle. She promised him they could talk in the morning, and then cried briefly when he cried. She walked him to his car and waited as he placed the key in the ignition, frowning, and pulled out briskly into the desolate street. The light turned green and soon he was gone. He was a sensitive person, she thought. He just had such strange ideas about what was missing from where.

Jen drove home alone. She felt calm and clear. The streets were quiet, and the sound of the engine vibrated around her. The porch light was on, as she had left it, and the screen door, which slammed too hard, slammed too hard behind her.

Once inside, she took off her coat and filled the teakettle with water. She crumpled a piece of paper and threw it across the floor for her cat to play with. She stood and listened to the stillness of her empty house.

While Jen waited for the water to boil, she picked up her phone to check the messages. There was one, from a few hours earlier in the evening.

“You have . . . one . . . new . . . message. Left . . . yesterday . . . at . . . nine . . . thirty-three . . . P.M.” The robotic words sounded strange and staggered, dropped into their syntax like cans on an assembly line.

When the message clicked on, the first sound Jen heard was conversation and laughter. Then David’s voice, slightly husky and affectionate and teasing.

“Hi, baby. I’m looking at you right now,” he said. “You’re across the room from me, talking to Mike.”

Jen remembered talking to Mike at the gallery, and holding a glass in her hand, and laughing at something he told her about the caterer.

“Now you just laughed,” David’s voice said. She could imagine the scene from his vantage point, the sight of herself from across the room, in her flowered dress, which she was still wearing.

Then David’s voice dropped to a whisper, and Jen imagined him cupping the cell phone with his hand in the room she had been in just hours before, and which was now dark and empty and elsewhere.