Adam believed she had started with “feelings.” That must have been the first word she used. Even at that he was too obtuse and had not detected anything amiss—because, goddamn it, they all had feelings for one another. They were in the Room day after day, week after week, year after year, he had never worked anywhere else, nor had she, the Room itself was the same room he had started in at twenty-one in the summer of ′71, though of course they had changed the furniture, rearranged and made way for the gray-blue that replaced the Fisher-Price colors. Apart from his parents’ home, apart from the two homes he’d lived in with his two families, his feelings were here, right here. The feelings weren’t about closeness, he hurried to say, but reporting, it entailed feelings. Who could report without feeling? And your status, there was a well of feelings about your status, and your place in the Room, and how you were seen and how Adam saw you. But these were feelings from a group of public feelings, and naturally she had those kinds of feelings about him. He was the authority figure. He was Dad. He was in charge. Do you have a feel for what Adam’s thinking is on this? How does Adam feel about the top?

“Crush” was the second word, and then, because it was in the past tense, as in having had it years ago, and because it was a “foolish” one, and because the funny—Martina was funny—stories she told about various things that had happened and he’d completely misunderstood, like the time the white flowers came and she’d actually sent them to herself in hopes that he might ask her about them—but no, no, that was later, that was recently … Adam moved away from the wall and found himself edging back to the door of his office, thinking if he were near the windows he possibly would be unseen from the Room. He slid his way along the windowsills, reached his bookcase, and somehow got into the chair behind his desk.

“I have to face that I have fallen in love with you.” From the safety of his chair, he could replay it in his head. It was possible he had sneezed when she said it. How does a person want you to respond when she says such a thing? It had to have been obvious, by that point, toward the end, that he did not share her—her—regard. He sounded like a prig. He was a prig. He was going to sneeze again. No, he wasn’t. Yes. He couldn’t find a tissue. He hadn’t been able to then either.

He thought she had gone out to get him a tissue. But she hadn’t. She’d just … left.