By midday they’d changed the locks. The mugging was already on several neighborhood blogs: a woman was punched in the face before sunset in Prospect Park near Ninth Street after a man demanded her belongings and she refused to hand them over. There was no mention of any other man, any husband.

“It’s like you weren’t even there,” she said, closing the laptop with an unsatisfying click.

“At least you weren’t actually punched in the face,” Matthew muttered. He’d stayed in bed with her instead of rising early, then brought her a latte and an almond croissant. “Fuck. Just…” He trailed off and paced a bit.

She flung her overnight bag on the living room couch, stuffed socks into running shoes. “Do you think I’ll want to go running?”

“You never go running.”

“Maybe we can run together?”

Matthew sat down on the edge of the deep windowsill overlooking their block, which was visually chaotic. Brownstones and Federals flanked one modern folly across the street with skinny wood slats all along the exterior, a home better suited to a eucalyptus grove. Farther down the block there were doors boarded shut, doors with peeling paint, and glossy painted doors with distinctly modern house numbers—what Matthew called renovation font. Their own door was glossy, but as of now their house had no number, and they might possibly move before getting around to choosing one. The block was constantly under construction. During the day, the only reprieve from the buzz saws, jackhammers, and shouting men came during earliest morning and right around dusk. Though buying this house had been their impulsively optimistic move after getting back together, Matthew would have been happy to flip it and buy something else, but they’d only been living there for a year and Sarah wanted to stay long enough to see what it was like without such a racket. The window was open: city air blew fresher than was actually possible; a far-off siren wailed, but aside from that, the street was weirdly quiet. Plus his knuckles cracking, his knee bobbing up and down, the dishwasher’s almost imperceptible hum from the open-plan kitchen—she took it all in and ran upstairs for a sweater. Downstairs again, she folded and refolded it and—

“You sure you still want to go?” he asked.

“I want to get out of here.”

“Don’t you think we should stick around in case—”

“In case what? We have the answering machine for the landline. If the cops really need us, they’ll call. I’m fine, and I want to get going.”

“I have to tell you,” he said from his spot on the windowsill, “you don’t really seem fine.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, you look almost fine—which is strange—I was sure you’d have more bruising and the cut isn’t actually that bad, but—”