He was in the kitchen now, downstairs, doing what he did so easily: charming strangers into friends. She appreciated this about him; she appreciated knowing him so well.

They were still married.

Once they’d been strangers, Sarah and Matthew. They had been young and entirely separate. She liked to remember this. Also that he’d been in the engineering program, that his parents wouldn’t help him pay for school, that they’d wanted him to go to community college. After several weeks of watching him make strange choices in Acting 101 mostly involving silence, she found herself walking alongside him one day after class. By the time they reached their bikes, both locked up outside the same building at the end of the block, she’d learned that he’d enrolled in the class because his grades had dipped because he never participated in seminar discussions, so he’d summoned the courage to see a therapist at the student health center about his crippling shyness about public speaking, and the therapist had decided what Matthew needed was a semester of acting.

You don’t seem shy, Sarah had said.

Nice, he said. I guess it’s working.

Then he’d kissed her. That shy stranger. The wind picked up. She was twenty; he was twenty-one.

They sat in the shade of an oak tree in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a little too cold to be sitting outside. She was wearing a Victorian-style lace shirt. Ripped jeans. Brown oxfords. She didn’t remember dates and anniversaries; it was weather and clothing for her. Matthew in a blue flannel shirt. Flannel stretched over a pair of broad shoulders still generally carried erotic promise for her. Unoriginal? You bet. But there it was: flannel. Blue. Wind. A stick scraping through dirt. Patches of unmowed grass. He cracked all of his knuckles. He cracked his back.

SHE HEARD A DOOR OPENING. She was never in the right place. She should have been downstairs helping already. Instead of hurrying to the kitchen right then, she took a book off the shelf and pretended to be deeply interested in Jewish Buddhists. Kiki passed her on the stairwell, giving the thumbs-up that Sylvie had gone back to sleep. Sarah mirrored her gesture and followed Kiki downstairs. She’d been wrong about Matthew. He wasn’t talking to anyone; he wasn’t even drinking beer. Karim and Heather were in a heated discussion, but Matthew was focused on a design magazine, sipping red wine. He had a nearly full bottle in front of him. Sarah took a glass from the open shelf. They were both, she noticed, instantly making themselves comfortable here. He didn’t look up.

“Why do you get to say whether someone’s gender identity is real or not?” Heather erupted. “How are you so confident?” She turned to Kiki. “How is he so freaking sure about this?”

“Well,” said Kiki, raising one thin eyebrow, “you know.”