“What are we going to do with all this stuff?” asked Grant.

“You’re going to use it to cook me ten-course dinners, of course.” Joey slipped her hands under his T-shirt at the base of his spine.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Eat,” she said into his chest. “I’m going to eat all of your masterpieces.”

“How generous.” He cracked his neck back and forth.

Her mouth opened. The words to tell him about Leo in town hung in the back. They hid behind her tonsils.

She and Grant had such a simple relationship. Her first simple relationship.

Grant knelt beside the boxes, sifting. He held up a white ceramic mezuzah. “I’ll hang this up, yeah?”

“Sure.” Joey went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The refrigerator was leaking murky purple again. She put down a towel to sop it up—a stiff white towel covered in yellow smudges, a towel of suspicious origins. From Grant’s bachelor life, probably.

“Mezuzah is up,” he called. “I even Googled the prayer to say.”

When she returned to the foyer, Grant was holding up the painting. “Now where should I hang my gift?” He smirked. “It deserves a place of prominence, don’t you think? In our marital home.”

“Only if you want me to paint a picture of your dick to go beside it. Then we’ll be those people. The strange genitalia people.”

“Well, what kind of studying is going to have to occur to render that painting?” He pulled her into him with one hand and set down the painting with the other.

“Don’t you wish.” The moon outside hooked over Grant’s head.

Grant kissed her forehead.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

*  *  *

Joey hadn’t known that her last day as a lawyer would be her last day. In fact, she’d just reached the pinnacle. Partnership. Her father had shown up from Florida with champagne. They’d alerted him first—the King of Estate Planning. Scott toasted her. “My big-deal daughter. You’ve worked so hard for this.” It was eleven A.M. The champagne fizzed down Joey’s tubes the wrong way.

She got flowers from her biggest client. Not flowers so much as a garden. It took up her whole desk. Two mailroom guys had to carry it in.

“They’ll fit into your new office,” said Mark Delisio, the managing partner who’d come down to slap her shoulders. He slapped them twice before halting, presumably coming to the realization that she was a woman with shoulders as delicate as tissue paper.

He smiled with his mouthful of veneers. No woman had made partner in her group in twenty-eight years.