He’s back, but he’s leaving. It is almost over. Rubbing her forefinger over the satiny waxed surface of her elm-plank desk, her coffee cold, waiting for him to finish packing, waiting to drive him to the train station with his junk. Metallic light falling from behind the steaming roofline, sifting over the yard, baking the damp thatch; early autumn rusting at its edges. Property line bracken dried up and curling like claws. Skinny fingers feeling his pockets for change. Will he marry her? A crash in the guest room. Clumsy—stumbling over his tackle. Beethoven’s same tattoo scratches across the gramophone he’s set on the floor, needling the old grievances. He’s humming along.

Humming along, breaking up the god-awful hush. He blew in like the fog a week ago, covering everything, erasing all the landmarks, honesty and routine and love—but she was armed to the teeth, priming her artillery, caught in the cellar with her flashlight, failing batteries casting a jaundiced spotlight on her secreted valuables, the fruit of six years’ hard labor. Her apples, her onions, her potatoes, her six maiden jars of honey. Six years of sweat and faith, and this was what she had to show for it.

All week the clouds have poured endlessly by, lie upon farrago upon prevarication. She’s had to drag the truth out of him, bit by bit. When, exactly? How? Where? And still she’s faced the facts, obvious no matter what he says: that the life that had made her so stupidly happy was a fraud, an illusion. That the hallway mirror, with its loving border of hand-painted hearts, frames the face of a man who is dead to her.

Livid and harsh, utterly apart: that’s the face she’s shown, listening to him empty the closets, box up his papers, Frieda trailing him down the hall squeezing a cat, thumping his rubber waders down the attic stairs, sheared like Joan of Arc thanks to him. Like living in a house of wax, that deceptively transparent, that destructible, that glazed. He hums: so pleased with himself. She’s divorcing him; she told him straight off. He can’t even look her in the eye, the bastard—afraid of the medusa head he’ll see, the levitating snakes and the sudden, deadly stiffening.

But she has to be surgical, to the bone. She has to be practical. Divorce is the only possible solution, the absolutely magnetic choice—if it is a choice, of which she is doubtful. He has left her no other choice. The bird flies itself to the hunter— Dostoyevsky. Ted’s dragging this out has been killing her—the deceit, the evasions, the sickening suspense, all of it leaving the stink of rot somewhere beneath the surface, something foul tamped into the walls. She wants a divorce. She has to want it.