Everything is tricky here, pretending to be what it’s not. Press-board cabinets with a “walnut” veneer. Formica in a “granite” pattern. White metal folding closet doors with a “wood” grain. Windows with plastic inserts to make the glass look paned. Everything removed miles and miles from the walnut forest and the Italian granite quarry and the old-world mullion shop. Although the apartment does exist in the physical world, it is in a way, virtual. The air is thin—warm and dry as it comes out of the floor vents. She can see that Neale has tried to overlay this bleak rental unit with domestic touches that wouldn’t have occurred to her back in her old house, where function was the only consideration, where form didn’t even bother to follow. Here, though, a fake fireplace has been filled with a grate and an arrangement of birch logs that will never be burned. On the far wall, though, a sliding glass door to a balcony reveals a real fire inside a small grill, which is currently aglow with coals. Claude goes out and slaps on two tuna steaks and sits on a bent lawn chair to oversee their progress from raw to raw-but-seared.

He knocks on the glass and waves Cate outside.

“We have, you see, a très belle vue du lac.” And he’s technically correct. A narrow strip of lake is definitely visible between two other apartment buildings jammed in closer to the water. Which is very still, the ice just having melted. Neale complained on the phone about the saws of local ice fishermen, saying she’d probably be bitching about the engines of powerboats in the summer. But today all is very blue and still.

Rationally, Cate understands Neale’s move. Everything she has done to put space and change between herself and the assault is understandable. Although Cate was there to save her, she was not reliably around once Blanks started sucking her away. Meanwhile, Neale couldn’t be alone—how could she be? So she got free of the city and her neighborhood and her house and her hovering parents, grabbed a husband out of marital retirement, and bolted with him in tow, and this is where she landed—a manageable town surrounded by farms and prairie.

Nonetheless, Cate hates the move and takes it as a personal rejection. And is jealous of Claude. Her strongest emotions are particularly resistant to reason. And because of this, they stick out, obvious and pathetic.

Sailor has gone off on his own mission, to find Joe. The two come back through the hallway, wriggling around each other in a comic way. Sailor loves who he loves.

Joe fills a bowl with water and sets it on the floor. Cate tells him, “I got you something, some Basinski you may not already have.” She pulls the album out of her backpack.