“I’m doing the best I can.” She stares out the window, trying to keep herself in check, mesmerized by the cars racing by her window, so many of them, one after another. Where are they all going? she wonders. How can there be so many people with somewhere to go right at this exact minute? It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. It’s supposed to be a day of rest.

“Katriina, what are we doing?”

“I don’t know, baby.” She can picture Shawn in their kitchen, leaning against the counter, his hand on the back of his neck, head hanging low. “This is stupid. We shouldn’t be fighting, not now, not with everything else going on.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” His voice is hoarse. “I mean…us. This marriage.”

Katriina feels all the air leave her lungs. “Excuse me?” she manages to whisper.

There is a long silence on the other end. She tries to catch her breath, but the air just won’t come back. Fragments of thought stagger through her mind, but she can’t grab on to any of them. She can hear Shawn’s breath on the other end. It’s like they are teetering on the edge of something, waiting for the slightest breeze to push them into the chasm.

“Nothing,” says Shawn. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

Everything is going to be okay, Katriina reassures herself, forming the words with her mouth without making the sounds.

4:30 p.m.

Katriina lies on her new couch in the middle of her new living room, where she has been stationed since it was delivered an hour ago, and where she plans to stay indefinitely. The couch is dark blue corduroy, plush and overstuffed, still stiff around the edges where no children have repeatedly slid off to retrieve a toy, no husband has leaned his forearms against tree-trunk legs hinged in a wide V while watching the football game. The rest of the house is still empty of furniture, and lying here Katriina has the sensation that she is floating on a raft in the middle of a vast ocean, drifting lazily under a ceiling of stars. She stares up, unblinking, and feels the walls recede away from her, the room opening up into a dark expanse as wide and endless as she imagines the hole in her heart must be. With one pale hand she begins drawing a long, looping spiral on the inside of her calf with a box cutter, focusing all her energy on her task. She watches the blood ooze out onto the dark fabric of the couch, no longer caring about the stain, the scar, the questions. There will be no more questions. Not anymore.