A marriage counselor booked them for twelve sessions. Each session lasted two hours, twenty-four hours in all. During those twenty-four hours they released into the mild air of the marriage counselor’s office millions of words. Their longest conversation. The polished floor, the walls, the perforated ceiling tile drank in the unstoppable flow. Barbara Cormin wept and shouted. Peter Cormin moaned, retreated, put his head on his arms. The histories they separately recounted were as detailed as the thick soft novels people carry with them to the beach in the summer. Every story elicited a counter story, until the accumulated weight of blame and blemish had squeezed them dry. “What are we doing?” Peter Cormin said, moving the back of his hand across and across his mouth. Barbara thought back to the day she had stood by the sunlit tulip bed and said, “Something’s wrong,” and wondered now what had possessed her. A hunger for words, was that all? She asked the marriage counselor for a glass of cold water. She feared what lay ahead. A long fall into silence. An expensive drowning.

But they were surprisingly happy for quite some time after, speaking to each other kindly, with a highly specific strategy, little pieces moved on a chess board. What had been tricky territory before was strewn with shame. Barbara was prepared now to admit that marriage was, at best, a flawed and gappy narrative. Occasionally some confidence would wobble forward and, one of them, Barbara or Peter, might look up cunningly, ready to measure the moment and retreat or advance. They worked around the reserves of each other’s inattention the way a pen and ink artist learns to use the reserve of white space.

“Why?” Barbara asked Peter.

“Why what?”

“Why did he do it? Shoot himself.”

“No one knows for sure.”

“There’s always a note. Wasn’t there a note?”

“Yes. But very short.”

“Saying?”

“He was lonely.”

“That’s what he said, that he was lonely?”

“More or less.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“That there was no one he could talk to.”

“He had a family, didn’t he? And business associates. He had you, he’s known you for years. He could have picked up the phone.”

“Talking isn’t just words.”

“What?”

Barbara sees herself as someone always waiting for the next conversation, the way a drunk is forever thinking ahead to the next drink.