She stopped talking. Her eyes surveyed the room. Then her attention went inward. He was awake. She could feel it through the walls and buildings, through the oceans, through three years of strained attentiveness. She flapped her arms a little to get up from the chair more quickly. The sun blinded her. She longed to sit at the table and listen to the ceiling. She longed for the sound of the bed creaking. She couldn’t stand being away from that sound. Her heart was pounding wildly.

‘Sorry,’ she said to Henny, and, ‘Goodbye, kids,’ to the indistinct small people dancing around in the sun’s rays. And Henny shouted something after her, but the wind blew it off course.

‘Okay,’ she shouted back, ‘okay.’

Let it go well, just this once, she thought, and, as God is my witness I will never ask for a cat, just let him be asleep. Just don’t let him be awake.

She removed her shoes outside on the mat, and crept in sideways through the door, as if it would make less noise if it weren’t opened so wide. Then she stood, stiff as a statue in the door to the living room, because there he sat, with the newspaper open in front of him, leaning forward toward his cup of coffee. Incredibly slowly, he lifted his head, and he looked her up and down as if he had never seen her before.

‘Well,’ he said flatly, ‘has something horrible happened? You look like it.’

‘No.’

She took one step toward him, then stood still again.

‘I – I just stopped in at Henny’s. I figured since you were sleeping –’

Her voice receded and cracked.

‘I heard you leave,’ he said, engrossed again in the newspaper.

She stared at his Adam’s apple. It was going up and down, up and down. If only it would stop. If only something would stop. She would feel better if he would calm down his Adam’s apple.

‘I would like to – I mean – don’t you think it would be nice to have a little cat?’

‘They smell,’ he said, irritated. ‘You shouldn’t let her put nonsense like that in your head.’

‘No.’ She hung her jacket in the closet.

Then she sat down carefully in her usual chair, taking pains to take up as little room as possible. He read the ads. His face was horrible. Worse than when there were typos, she thought. She shouldn’t have gone. By constantly staying home, she warded off something terrible that was always just about to happen, something she was expecting, something that she, every day, minute by minute, pushed back into place like a wall that would topple if you didn’t press against it with all your might.

The clock struck six.

He neatly folded the newspaper and observed her silently for a moment.

He said slowly, ‘There were no typos.’