Never in the history of their relationship had Eric been so decisive, so assertive. Even his proposal, she remembered, had been pleading—please say yes—and as then, Marianne was too taken aback to argue with him.

“Where are you now?”

“Orlando,” he said, without pleasure. “At the School of Hospitality and Travel Services. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Wait,” she said, but Eric had already hung up. She was about to dial him back when Davonte came in, breathless, but not from a run. He was still wearing his pajamas, loose drawstring pants printed with cartoon penguins and a thin gray tank that showed off his newly defined delts. “Have you seen the Weather Channel today? Have you read the paper yet, Marianne?”

“Tad Tucker was on the Weather Channel?”

“Who’s Tad Tucker?” he said. “I’m talking about the storm. Way out there, but look.” He opened a weather map on Marianne’s computer and clicked through the spaghetti model possibilities: to New Orleans, to Pensacola, to Tampa. One of them had the storm headed straight for Sarasota. “I’m just glad I got my book done,” he said, as if the storm’s arrival were a sure thing.

Maybe it was the smugness of his tone, the fact that he was wearing pajamas midmorning, or the definition of his gleaming deltoids, but Marianne exploded.

“Davonte, your book is not done! It isn’t done, and you didn’t get it done, anyway. You had someone else write it for you, which is lazy and dishonest, not to mention a complete waste of the education we are supposedly providing you. The storm is not coming here. Okay? It’s not!”

He turned around and blinked, the color rising in his cheeks as if she’d slapped him. She would have liked to slap him, or throw water in his face, or do something else dramatic and hurtful.

“Just thought you’d want to know,” he said, closing down the screen and getting up.

“Well, I don’t!” Marianne called after him. “I don’t want to know!”

He left the door open behind him. Outside it was hot and still, the sky a flat, cloudless blue. Marianne slammed the door shut and sat down at her chair, still warm from Davonte’s body. Her email was filled with notifications of new webinar registrations, a few dozen questions from prospective and current students. So many of the subject lines were accompanied by multiple question marks, or the emails themselves marked urgent, that she could not imagine sorting through each confusion, each urgency. There was one from Janine Gray (subject line: POEM?), and Marianne hovered her cursor over the email, but did not click to open it.

16