Another silence. The world outside was black and white and empty. “I don’t—” Hanna said at last. “I don’t know how to fix that. I’m proud of you, of what you do, I really am. It’s just …”

“Not sustainable?”

And Hanna, who so often had all the answers, had no answer.

“How about we think about this in the morning?” Liza suggested. “How about you just—can you just hold me?”

So Hanna held her. And it helped.

Or that’s what Liza told herself.

She couldn’t sleep, but she pretended she could for Hanna’s benefit, and she suspected Hanna was doing the same for hers. In the dark, without needing to look at each other or speak to each other, when your only language was touch, it was so easy to be reassured, to feel that this person you were with, whose shape and scent and body you knew almost as well as your own, could never not be there. So they lay with their eyes closed and held each other, their arms making promises neither of them were sure they could keep.

It seemed silly, just then, to be wondering where it all went wrong. Not even silly; naïve. After all, marriage didn’t work like that. It wasn’t a machine, or a game, and if it was a mystery, it was a whole lot more Dashiell Hammett than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was messy and complex, and the really awkward thing about it was that it wasn’t supposed to be anything. Anything except what you made it, at least.

That, Liza felt, was the great thing about a murder. With a murder you knew where you were. Somebody was dead. Somebody was responsible. And at the end somebody went to jail. Well, sometimes somebody went to jail. A depressing fact you learned in true crime reporting was that a whole lot of murders went unsolved, and even if somebody was convicted, beyond reasonable doubt was a whole lot more doubtful than it seemed in the books.

But compared to marriage, murders—even real murders—were a walk in the park. Marriage was getting to the end of the serial and hearing the host say, “When I first started this journey, I thought I’d find answers, but all I have is more questions,” every single day.

Forensics. That was what relationships needed. You should be able to send arguments off to a lab and get a little report back saying, “This happened because your mother-in-law is an unbearable snob,” or, “Trace DNA evidence shows that you definitely did say you were going to be back late this evening and your wife just didn’t hear you because she never pays attention.”