It happened, she told me, maybe six months before she and Ezra broke up. It was winter, and she was walking with a friend in Chelsea, looking at the galleries, maybe. They turned the corner onto the West Side Highway, and the icy wind off the Hudson came slicing into them. She started to shiver, and her friend, who lived abroad and whom she rarely saw, paused whatever he’d been in the middle of saying to ask if she wanted his coat. She said no, because of course she wasn’t about to take the coat off his back, no matter how cold she was. And then the conversation continued, but almost without her. She stayed back, frozen in that question, amazed that he had asked it: that someone might think to ask such a thing so intuitively, as if thoughtfulness were so much part of his nature that the question, which housed such kindness, such genuine concern, could be nearly automatic. It was simply who he was, how he had been taught, or maybe taught himself, to live. And his care touched a nerve in her, because she’d begun to feel, more and more, that it was something the man she was living with, and with whom she planned to spend the rest of her life, lacked. It occurred to her that in all the years she’d been with him, Ezra had never once offered her his sweater or jacket. And I was almost always cold! she said. Always shivering, even when everyone else was warm. Though it’s possible he didn’t notice.

But it was more than that, she said. She could be sick in bed, and he wouldn’t think to bring her a cup of tea, which wouldn’t have cost him anything. Once, she was making him a bagel and the knife slipped and cut deeply into her thumb. She held it under the cold water, bleeding. He got up from the counter and came around to her, and she thought he was going to hug her from behind, but instead he picked up the knife and finished cutting the bagel, and put it in the toaster himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, she said. She always knew that he loved her, in so far as he was capable. He was just busy, he was absorbed, he had no instinct for how to take care of someone else, which has to begin with noticing, with listening. But in that moment that her friend understood that she was cold and paused what he was saying to offer his own coat, she felt the pain of what she’d been missing.

The wind kept playing in Sophie’s hair as she spoke, revealing the bald patches of her scalp.