There’s a trio of texts from Elizabeth waiting for me after I shower. She wants me to pick up a prescription on my way home, and did I get her text, and, Let me know you got this.

I reply: Got the texts. Picking up now. But when I finally make it to the front of the line at CVS, they can’t find her order, and I have to check with Elizabeth to make sure the script got called in, at which point she tells me I’m at the wrong store. I was supposed to go to Rite Aid down in Bridgehampton. Half an hour later, Rite Aid hasn’t filled it either, so I give up and head home empty-handed.

“There you are,” Elizabeth says, like a goose chase for Ativan had been my idea. Again, the choice: love or anger. Elizabeth is vibrant. Buzzing. I’m disoriented by how glad I am to see her this glad to see me. She’s done the cruelest thing, but hate feels too easy, too provincial, because yes, the worst has happened, but somehow we’re here, standing in the kitchen, alive and awake and blinking like a pair of plague victims after the fever breaks. To my astonishment, rage falls back. Relief takes the lead.

She asks, “Did you run?”

I nod. “Rowing machine, too. A few weights.”

“Tomorrow’s going to hurt.”

Maybe. Maybe not. Tomorrow is a foreign land. Today I have a choice: love or hate. Tonight offers a ritual reset, the opportunity to role-play forgiveness. “I want to take you out. Just the two of us.” Love.

She glances over her shoulder, instinctively considering the boys’ feelings and deciding they aren’t hers to manage anymore. “Sure,” she says. “That sounds nice.”

“You pick the place.” I crack open a Pellegrino. “Have you seen Nick this morning?”

“Hm?”

I drink from the bottle, carbonation like sandpaper on my throat, and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth before repeating, “Have you seen Nick?”

“No. Today, you mean? No, not yet.” She pulls her hair up, but finding no rubber band on her wrist, her fists full of hair remain stacked atop her head. “I don’t want to,” she says.

I move closer, putting her in range of my sweated-out pheromones, my heat, and I slide my body up to sit on the counter. “What don’t you want?”

“I don’t want—to see Nick. I don’t want to think about him.” She lets her hair and arms fall, lets it all go. “I just want to go back to how things were before.”

White-hot splinters pierce the corners of my eyes. “Things have been off-kilter around here,” I say, suddenly certain I couldn’t bear to hear her put it into words.

“Yes,” she says. “They have.” She scratches her collarbone. “It’s been strange to have people around all the time.”

I say, “It’s been distracting.”