Her thesis topic is constraints on the formation of depositional placer accumulations in coarse alluvial braided river systems. She likes that when people hear this, they stop asking her questions about her work. To most people, those words are like another language. To Tanya, they are like speaking her native tongue.

When she gets back to the apartment just after seven, Dallas is already home, cooking himself spaghetti on the one element on the stove that hasn’t burned out. He has the noodles in the pot and a jar of sauce open on the counter. When the noodles are ready he will just dump the sauce in the pot and then eat it like that and call it spaghetti. At least when she makes it, she tries to throw in some real vegetables to make it healthier, carrots or tomatoes or maybe mushrooms and green peppers, but not the red ones because those are more expensive. And for what? They’re just green peppers with a shiny red coat on. Tanya knows how to make the best of being poor – she grew up that way. Dallas did not. Tanya has never met Dallas’s parents, but she has seen their house, seen his beautiful mother out running errands in a Canada Goose parka, which Tanya Googled so she knows how much it cost. Dallas’s beautiful mother, Rochelle. Dallas might not get anything from his family now, but when he was growing up Tanya is sure that they must have given him everything.

“Hi, babe,” Dallas says when she comes in the kitchen. “Want some supper?”

“I already ate,” she says, which is a lie, but she doesn’t think she can stomach Dallas’s mushy noodles and jarred sauce. “At school.”

“Always working so hard, Tannybear.” He kisses her cheek, then pulls the pot of water off the stove, dumping it into a cracked plastic colander sitting in the sink. Then he dumps the noodles back into the pot and tips the jar of sauce in on top, just like she knew he would. He smiles over at her, and her insides coil with rage. He is being too nice to her, and it makes her crazy that she likes it.

I should leave him, she thinks. I need to leave him.

“Maybe I’ll go back to Paul’s tonight.” Paul is Tanya’s brother, who she technically lives with, sleeping on a futon in the living room of the two-bedroom house he shares with his wife and four kids and his mother-in-law, though she can’t remember the last time she slept there.

“Come on,” Dallas says, scratching his head. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know.” She can feel her voice shake. She is twenty-five. The same age that Finn was when she left Dallas. She could start over again, too. Couldn’t she?