Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still wearing her coat, looking at the counter where she'd left the grocery bag that morning — mushrooms, cream, a baguette that had gone slightly stale in eight hours. Four years. It seemed like a number that should feel bigger than it did, or maybe smaller.

She had the mushrooms sliced by the time Marcus came through the door, and he stopped in the entryway with his keys still in his hand.

"You cooked."

"I'm cooking. Present tense. It might not work out."

He set a paper bag on the table and started shrugging out of his jacket. "I got wine. And I got the cake from the place on Ninth, the one you like, but I want to say up front that the guy behind the counter talked me into a lemon thing instead of chocolate, and I'm not sure I made the right call."

"Lemon's fine."

"You're being generous."

"I'm being efficient. Come stir this."

He came. He was better at the stove than she was and they both knew it, so she handed off the pan and started on the salad, and for a while there was just the sound of the burner and the knife on the board. Their apartment was small enough that they had learned to move around each other without thinking.

"Do you remember what we did last year?" he asked.

"We ordered Thai and watched most of a movie."

"That was two years ago. Last year I had that thing in Denver."

"Right." She thought about it. "So we didn't do anything."

"We talked on the phone for an hour." He tasted the sauce, added salt. "It counted."

They ate at the small table with the overhead light off, because Dana had found candles in the drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus. The lemon cake, it turned out, was excellent. Marcus said so twice.


The Sixth of October

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment with her keys still in her hand, taking in the mess: two coffee mugs on the counter, Ben's running shoes tipped over by the radiator, the mail she'd been meaning to sort since Tuesday. Four years ago tonight they'd been strangers eating bad tacos at a work thing in Somerville. Now this.

She started with the dishes. Then she found the candles they'd bought for a blackout two winters ago and put them on the table, which required moving Ben's laptop, three library books, and a half-assembled bike pedal she decided not to ask about.

He texted at 5:40: *train's stuck at Porter. don't panic.*

*not panicking,* she wrote. *bringing wine?*

*obviously.*

He came in at 6:20, coat damp, holding a bottle of the Portuguese red they liked and a paper bag from the Italian place on Highland. "I know we said we'd cook," he said. "But I also know neither of us wanted to cook."

"I already made the salad."

"Then we have a salad and lasagna. That's a real meal." He kissed her, then noticed the candles and the cleared table and stood there a second longer than he needed to. "You cleaned."

"I moved things. There's a difference."

They ate slowly. Ben told her about the woman on the platform who had opinions about the MBTA and shared them generously. Dana told him she'd almost bought him a gift and then remembered they'd agreed not to, and he admitted he'd almost done the same, and they laughed about being the kind of people who followed rules they'd made up themselves.

Later, on the couch, the candles burned down uneven. She put her feet in his lap. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Four years," he said.

"Four years," she said, and neither of them added anything to it, because nothing needed adding.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt butter, which meant Dana had gotten distracted again.

"It's fine," she said, scraping the pan into the sink. "The second batch will be better. I bought extra shallots because I knew this would happen."

Marcus leaned in the kitchen doorway, still in his work clothes, tie loosened. "Four years and you've never once made a sauce without a casualty."

"Four years and you've never once offered to help before the crisis stage."

He took off his tie, hung it on the back of a chair, and rolled up his sleeves. "Give me the shallots."

They worked around each other in the narrow galley kitchen, a choreography learned over three apartments and one difficult winter. Dana handled the pasta water. Marcus minced. He asked about her sister's phone call; she told him the short version, saving the longer one for later, when they'd be on the couch.

"Did you get the cake?" she asked.

"I got the pie. The bakery was out of the lemon thing you like."

"Pie's better anyway."

They ate at the small table by the window, the one they'd bought used and sanded down themselves. Marcus had put on the record Dana gave him their first Christmas, the one with the scratch in the third track that they both now considered part of the song. Outside, someone was arguing about a parking space.

"I was thinking," Dana said, "about the lease renewal."

"Not tonight."

"No. Not tonight." She refilled his glass. "I just meant I'm glad it's this place. I'm glad it's still this."

Marcus reached across and held her wrist, briefly, the way he did instead of saying certain things out loud.

Later they ate pie straight from the tin, watching half a movie neither of them followed. She fell asleep first. He turned off the lamp and stayed where he was.


The rain started around four, which turned out to be a small mercy. Neither Dana nor Marcus had wanted to leave the apartment anyway.

"Six years," Marcus said, holding up the bottle of wine he'd hidden behind the flour canister for three days. "You didn't find it."

"I found it Tuesday." Dana was slicing shallots with the slow care of someone who'd learned knife skills from YouTube. "I just let you have it."

He kissed the back of her neck and took over the cutting board, because he was faster and she always let him think it was chivalry rather than efficiency. She moved to the record player instead, flipping through the milk crate they'd been meaning to replace with actual shelving since 2021.

"Not the Sade," Marcus said.

"You love the Sade."

"I love it in October. It's May."

She put on the Sade. He didn't complain.

They'd talked about going out—there was a place on Delaware with good pasta and a waiter who remembered them—but the reservation had felt like an obligation, and obligation was the opposite of what six years had earned them. So instead: chicken thighs, too much butter, the good plates that had been Dana's grandmother's and which they used maybe four times a year.

Over dinner they argued amiably about whether their anniversary was the night of the party or the following Thursday, when Marcus had finally called. Dana held that the party counted. Marcus insisted on the phone call, since that was when he'd had to be brave.

"You were not brave. You said, and I quote, 'so anyway.'"

"'So anyway' took me four days to draft."

Afterward they left the dishes and lay on the couch with the window cracked, listening to the rain move down the street. Dana fell asleep first. Marcus stayed awake a while longer, doing nothing in particular, feeling lucky about it.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia's plan to grill on the balcony was finished. She stood in the kitchen doorway with a package of chicken thighs in her hand and considered the situation.

"We could order," Marcus said from the couch, where he was pretending not to watch her think.

"It's seven years. I'm not celebrating seven years with a delivery app."

"Eight."

She turned. "It's seven."

"You moved into the apartment on Ferndale in April. That was 2018." He held up his phone as though it contained proof, though the screen was dark. "We started dating the January before."

Delia set the chicken on the counter. She remembered the apartment on Ferndale — the radiator that clanked, the neighbor who played trumpet badly. She remembered meeting Marcus at his cousin's terrible New Year's party, and how they had talked in the stairwell until three in the morning about nothing at all.

"Seven years since we moved in together," she said. "Eight since the stairwell. We can celebrate both."

"So two dinners."

"So one dinner and you help me."

He got up. They worked around each other in the narrow kitchen, a choreography neither of them noticed anymore — he reached over her for the oregano, she stepped aside without looking. He seared the chicken in the cast iron. She put on the record his mother had given them, the one with the scratch in the second track, and opened the wine they'd been saving since Christmas without any occasion in mind.

They ate at the small table by the window. The rain kept up. Marcus told her about a coworker's divorce and then wished he hadn't, on tonight of all nights.

"It's fine," Delia said. She reached across and put her hand over his. "We're not them."

"No," he said. "We're not."


The rain started around four, which meant Dana's plan to grill fell apart before she'd even left work. She texted Marcus from the parking garage: *change of plans, don't stop at the store.*

He was already home when she got there, shoes off, sleeves rolled, standing in front of the open refrigerator like it might negotiate with him.

"There's half a pound of ground beef," he said. "And that jar of gochujang you bought in April and never opened."

"So, something."

"So, something."

Four years ago tonight they'd been at a wedding neither of them wanted to attend, seated together at the singles table, and she'd told him his tie looked like a placemat. He'd agreed. They'd left before the cake.

Now she changed out of her work clothes while he browned the beef, and when she came back in leggings and one of his college sweatshirts, he handed her a knife and pointed at the scallions. They worked without much talking. The rain moved against the kitchen window in gusts. Somebody's car alarm went off down the block and stopped.

"I got you something," Marcus said, "but it's stupid."

"How stupid."

"Moderately." He wiped his hands and pulled a small paper bag from behind the toaster. Inside was a tie, hideous, wide, printed with what appeared to be autumn gourds.

Dana laughed hard enough that she had to set the knife down. "You're going to wear this."

"To your sister's thing. In November."

"She'll hate it."

"That's the gift."

They ate on the couch out of mismatched bowls, the TV off, because Dana said she wanted to hear the rain. Marcus put his feet up on the coffee table, which she normally objected to, and tonight didn't.

Later she leaned against his shoulder and said, "Four years."

"Four years," he said, and neither of them added anything else, because there wasn't anything that needed adding.


Dana got home first, which never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the sink full of dishes from that morning, and decided the dishes could wait. Four years. Four years since a Tuesday in a bar on Cortland Avenue where Micah had explained, at length and with real conviction, why the Dodgers were a morally compromised franchise.

She was pulling the good plates down when he came in carrying a paper bag.

"You bought bread," she said.

"I bought the bread. You said you'd do the pasta."

"I'm doing the pasta. I'm just noting the bread."

He kissed the side of her head and set the bag on the counter, then started opening drawers, looking for the corkscrew that lived, as it always had, in the drawer by the stove. She handed it to him without comment. He'd lived here two and a half years and still checked three drawers first.

They cooked mostly in silence, the radio on low, the window over the sink fogging. Dana burned the garlic a little and Micah scraped it out of the pan and started over without being asked, which she chose to interpret as romance. He told her about a coworker's divorce. She told him her mother had called twice that week and hadn't mentioned marriage once, which felt like an event worth marking.

"You want to talk about that?" he asked.

"Not tonight."

"Okay."

They ate at the table instead of the couch. Afterward Micah produced a small paper sack of the almond cookies from the Chinese bakery on Twenty-Second, slightly crushed, and Dana laughed at him and ate three.

Later she found him on the fire escape with the last of the wine, and she climbed out and sat with her back against his shoulder, and neither of them said anything much for a long time.


The rain started around four, which Nadia decided was a good omen. It meant neither of them would feel guilty about staying in.

She got home first and found that Theo had already been there — the good cutting board was out, and a bag of shallots sat on the counter next to a receipt he hadn't bothered to throw away. Seven years. She still couldn't get him to throw away receipts.

He came in at five-thirty, shaking water off his jacket in the doorway of their apartment, which was the top half of a house in Somerville that they'd rented for four years and complained about for three.

"I got the fish," he said. "The guy tried to sell me swordfish. I held firm."

"Cod," she said. "As foretold."

"Cod."

They cooked the way they'd learned to cook together, which was inefficiently and with a lot of narration. Theo dredged the fillets while Nadia stood at the stove making the sauce her mother had never once made correctly, tasting it off a wooden spoon and then handing the spoon to him.

"More lemon," he said.

"That's what I thought." She squeezed the half he'd already used, then the fresh one.

They ate at the small table by the window with the rain coming sideways against the glass. There was a bottle of Beaujolais that neither of them knew anything about, and a candle in a jar that smelled faintly of pine because it was the only one they had.

"Seven years ago tonight," Theo said, "you told me you were probably moving to Chicago."

"I was probably moving to Chicago."

"You were not."

"I was open to it." She reached over and took a piece of potato off his plate. "Then you made me that terrible omelet."

"It was a good omelet."

"It was an omelet," she said, "and I stayed."


Nine years ago tonight, Dana had spilled beer on Marcus's shoe at a friend's cramped apartment party and then, mortified, offered to buy him a new pair. He'd said a drink would do.

Now she stood in their kitchen in Sacramento, cutting mushrooms into slices thicker than the recipe wanted, because Marcus liked them that way. The window over the sink had gone dark and thrown her own reflection back at her — hair up, one earring in, the other lost somewhere between the bedroom and here.

"Found it." Marcus came in holding the earring between two fingers like something excavated. "Under the dresser. There was also a receipt from 2019 and a cough drop."

"Don't tell me any more about under the dresser."

He put the earring on the counter and reached past her for the wine, an eleven-dollar bottle they'd both agreed was suspiciously good. He poured two glasses, then took over the mushrooms while she went to fix her ear.

They had discussed going out. There was a place downtown with white tablecloths, and Dana had looked at the menu twice before admitting she'd rather be home. Marcus had been relieved in a way he tried not to show, since he'd already made the reservation and would have to cancel it.

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus told her about his brother's ridiculous new truck. Dana described a coworker's slow, public unraveling over a spreadsheet. Around ten they put on the second half of a movie they'd started in April and never finished, and Marcus fell asleep against her shoulder before the plot resolved.

Dana didn't wake him right away. She sat there with the wine finished and the mushrooms gone and the television light moving over the walls, thinking that this was the whole thing, really — nine years of ordinary Tuesdays, and one of them tonight.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of the apartment they'd shared for two years, holding a grocery bag and considering the kitchen. Seven years since a bad party in Bushwick where Marcus had spent forty minutes explaining the merits of a band she'd never heard of. She'd gone home with him anyway.

She was searing the scallops when he came in, still in his work coat, snow melting on the shoulders.

"You're cooking," he said. "I was going to cook."

"You cooked last year and set off the smoke detector."

"That was the year before." He hung up his coat, came around behind her, kissed the side of her neck. "I got something."

"We said no presents."

"We said no *big* presents." He set a paper bag on the counter and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Portuguese wine they used to buy when they were broke, back when they lived in the place with the slanted floors. Six dollars a bottle. It had probably gone up.

Dana laughed. "That's actually perfect."

"I know."

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a repository for mail and a printer neither of them used. Marcus put on the band from the party, as a joke, then let it play because it was actually fine. Dana told him her sister had asked, again, at Thanksgiving, whether they were ever going to make it official. Marcus said he figured it was official when they signed a lease.

"That's what I said."

"What'd she say?"

"She said a lease has a term."

He thought about it, chewing. "Ours renews automatically."

Dana leaned back against the couch and let her foot rest against his leg. Outside, snow kept coming down over the parked cars. Neither of them suggested going anywhere.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt butter, which meant Danny had gotten distracted again.

"It's fine," he said, scraping the pan into the trash. "I bought a backup."

Priya set down her bag and saw the second package of scallops on the counter, still cold. "You bought two?"

"I know myself." He kissed her cheek, which was cold from the walk up from the bus stop. Four years ago tonight they'd met at his roommate's birthday party, where she'd spent twenty minutes explaining why the roommate's taste in music was indefensible, and Danny had agreed with everything she said, and later admitted he owned three of the albums.

She took over the pan while he opened the wine — a bottle they'd been saving since Thanksgiving, when they'd decided it was too nice for turkey. The kitchen was too small for two people, so they moved around each other the way they'd learned to, a choreography of hips and elbows.

"I have something," she said.

"We said no gifts."

"It's not a gift, it's a document." She pulled an envelope from her bag: printouts from three apartments in Somerville, all with second bedrooms, all forty dollars a month more than what they paid now. "For the studio. If you're still serious about the pottery thing."

Danny looked at the listings for a long time. "You circled the one with the bay window."

"I circled the one with the good light."

They ate on the couch because the table had become a repository for mail. Halfway through the bottle, Priya put her feet in his lap and said the scallops were slightly overcooked, and Danny said he knew, and she said she liked them that way, which was a lie he decided to let stand.

Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped. Neither of them got up.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia had to change plans. She'd wanted to eat on the fire escape, the way they had two years ago when the apartment was so new they still ate off paper plates.

"We could do the floor," Marcus said, coming in with his hair damp and his work bag dripping on the mat. "Blanket, candles. Indoor picnic."

"That's very sixth grade."

"Sixth grade was a great year for me."

So they moved the coffee table and spread out the quilt his grandmother had made, the one with the loose stitching along one edge that Delia kept meaning to fix. Marcus put on the record they'd bought at the flea market in Asheville, the Bill Withers with the scratch that made "Grandma's Hands" skip in the same place every time. Neither of them wanted to replace it anymore.

Delia had gotten the good bread from the bakery on Pearl, and olives, and a wedge of cheese the woman behind the counter had insisted on. Marcus contributed a bottle of wine he'd been hiding behind the cereal boxes for three weeks, plus a card he'd clearly bought that afternoon, the envelope still warm from his pocket.

"You said no gifts," she said.

"A card isn't a gift. A card is stationery."

She read it while he opened the wine, and she didn't say anything for a second, just pressed her thumb against the corner of it.

They ate on the floor with their backs against the couch. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped. Marcus told her about the argument he'd had with his sister; Delia told him she'd finally scheduled the dentist. Ordinary things, laid down between them like the plates.

Later, when the candles had gone soft and lopsided, she leaned against his shoulder and he put his hand on her knee, and the record skipped in its usual place, and neither of them got up to fix it.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen of their apartment in Fort Collins, still in her work fleece, and considered the counter: a bag of shallots, a chicken, the good olive oil they'd bought in October and rationed since. Four years ago tonight they had eaten gas station burritos in his car outside the trailhead and decided, without much ceremony, that this was a thing now.

She started the chicken. She was not a confident cook, but she had watched enough of Marcus to know that heat came first and patience came second.

He texted at 5:40: *stuck behind a train. do we have butter*

*we have butter*, she wrote. *don't buy anything.*

He came in at six with a bottle of wine anyway, and a paper cone of tulips that had clearly been grabbed at the King Soopers by the register, half of them already bruised. He looked at the stove and made a small approving noise.

"You seared it."

"I seared it aggressively."

They cooked the rest together, which was the part Dana had actually been looking forward to — Marcus salting things she'd forgotten to salt, her reaching around him for the tongs, the radio doing its low murmur. They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. The chicken was slightly dry. The potatoes were excellent.

Afterward he washed and she dried, and she told him about the woman at work who had asked, again, when they were going to make it official.

"What'd you say?"

"I said we're pretty official."

Marcus handed her a wet plate. "We could get a dog," he said. "That's official."

"That's a whole conversation."

"Not tonight," he agreed, and let the water out of the sink.


The Fourth of March

Nina got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still wearing her coat, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *don't eat, I'm cooking* — and realized she had exactly forty minutes before Dev walked in.

She'd planned this badly. The recipe was one his mother had taught her over speakerphone in October, and it required a patience Nina did not currently possess. She got the onions going anyway, then went to change out of her work clothes, then came back because she could smell them starting to catch.

Dev came in at six-twenty with a paper bag from the wine shop on Wexford and a bunch of ranunculus, which he'd chosen because they were not roses and because they were orange, which was the color of the dress she'd worn the night they met at Kelsey's terrible birthday party four years ago.

"You're burning it," he said.

"I'm developing it."

He took over the pan without being asked, the way he did, and she let him, the way she did. She poured the wine into the two mismatched glasses they'd never gotten around to replacing. They ate at the small table by the window instead of on the couch, which was the entire extent of the formality either of them wanted.

"Four years," Dev said. "That's longer than I lived in Pittsburgh."

"That's longer than my parents' first marriage."

They talked about the apartment lease, which came up in July, and about whether the upstairs neighbor was running some kind of business. Around ten they moved to the couch after all. Nina fell asleep against his shoulder during the second episode, and Dev stayed where he was, letting his arm go numb, watching the credits roll twice before he woke her.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia had to reroute her whole plan. She'd wanted to eat on the fire escape, the way they had two years ago when the apartment still smelled like the previous tenant's cigarettes and they'd owned exactly one fork between them.

Instead she moved the folding table into the living room, under the window, so the rain would at least be audible. She lit the candle Marcus's sister had given them at Christmas, the one that smelled aggressively of fig.

He came in at five-forty, shaking water off his jacket, holding a paper bag against his chest like something wounded.

"Don't look," he said.

"I'm looking."

"It's cannoli. From the place on Adams." He set the bag down and kissed the top of her head. "They only had four left. I got all four."

"That's not a gift, that's a lifestyle."

"You said no gifts."

"I said no *big* gifts." She turned the burner down under the pot. She'd been braising short ribs since two, mostly because the recipe took four hours and she'd wanted something to do with her hands. "Wine's open. It needs to breathe or whatever."

Marcus poured two glasses and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder into the pot. "That looks illegal."

"It's supposed to fall apart."

"Everything good does."

"That's very grim for an anniversary."

"It was supposed to be romantic." He tasted the sauce off her spoon and made a sound she'd been hearing for two years and still liked.

They ate slowly. The rain got louder, then softer. Around nine they moved to the couch, and he put on the movie they'd watched the first night she slept over, and neither of them made it past the first forty minutes awake. The candle burned down to nothing. The dishes waited.


The forecast said rain, which was fine with Dana. She'd been picturing the evening as an indoor thing anyway: the good pan out, the cheap Chianti she and Marcus had grown fond of during the year they'd shared the apartment on Third.

"Four years," Marcus said, coming in from the balcony with the herbs he refused to admit were mostly dead. "Do we do gifts for four? Is there a metal?"

"That's weddings." Dana was slicing shallots badly. "We agreed. No gifts."

"I know we agreed." He set the basil down and washed his hands, standing close enough that she had to lean around him for the cutting board. "I just want to note, for the record, that I honored an agreement I secretly opposed."

"Noted."

He took over the shallots. He was better at it and they both knew it, and neither of them said so. Dana poured the wine into the two glasses that didn't match, because the matching one had broken in the move, and they'd never replaced it.

"Remember Yelena's party?" she said. "You told me you were a structural engineer."

"I was a structural engineering *student*."

"You said it in the present tense."

"I was twenty-four and you were wearing that green thing." He scraped the shallots into the pan and the kitchen filled with that smell, which was, she thought, maybe the actual smell of her adult life. "I'd have said anything."

They ate at the coffee table with the TV off, which was their one concession to the occasion. The rain started around nine. Marcus put his feet up on the ottoman and Dana leaned into the side of him and they talked about nothing much — his sister's new job, whether the landlord would ever fix the radiator, a trip to Maine they'd been discussing for two years and would probably discuss for two more.

"Same time next year?" he said.

"Obviously," she said.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter: the cutting board Marcus had left out that morning, the mail she'd forgotten to sort on Saturday. Three years ago tonight they'd sat on the floor of his old apartment eating cold lo mein, and she had said, out loud, that she wanted this to be a real thing.

She put water on for pasta and texted him: *don't stop for anything, I've got it covered.*

He stopped for something anyway. She heard him fumbling with the door, and when he came in he had a bakery box balanced on one hand and a bottle of the cheap Lambrusco they'd drunk that first year, when neither of them had money.

"You said you had it covered."

"You said that last year and we ate crackers at eleven." He set the box down and kissed the side of her head, then took off his tie and hung it on the back of a chair, which was as close as he came to changing clothes.

They ate at the table instead of the couch. Dana had made the pasta with too much garlic, the way he liked it, and he told her about the guy at work who'd tried to take credit for the Halvorsen account, and she laughed in the right places and then stopped laughing and said she'd been thinking about the lease.

"Renewing?"

"Or not renewing. Looking at something with a second bedroom."

Marcus turned his glass slowly on the table. "For an office, or—"

"I don't know yet. Either."

"Okay," he said. "We can look."

Later they ate the cake standing up, out of the box, arguing pleasantly about whether the frosting was too sweet. The dishes stayed in the sink until morning.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She hung her coat on the hook by the door, and stood a moment in the quiet of the apartment, listening to the radiator tick. Three years. Three years since the night Marcus had walked her home from Ottilie's birthday party and neither of them had wanted the walk to end, so they'd circled the block twice.

She started the sauce. She wasn't a good cook, but she could make this one thing—her mother's recipe, with the anchovies mashed in so fine you couldn't see them, only taste the salt and depth.

Marcus came in at six-forty, carrying a paper bag and looking sheepish. "I got a cake," he said. "I know we said no gifts. A cake isn't a gift, it's a food group."

"You bought a cake and I made dinner. That's a real anniversary."

"That's a functional household." He set the bag on the counter and kissed the back of her neck, then leaned over the pot. "Did you put the fish in?"

"You'll never know."

"I always know."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus lit two candles that didn't match—one taper left from Hanukkah, one squat citronella from the fire escape—and Dana laughed at him for it, and then admitted the light was nice.

They talked about Ottilie, who was pregnant. About Marcus's brother, who wasn't speaking to their father. About whether they should get a dog, which was the conversation they always had instead of the other conversation, the one about rings and paperwork and what his mother kept asking.

"Next year," Dana said, meaning the dog, meaning maybe everything.

Marcus cut the cake. "Next year," he agreed, and gave her the corner piece with the most frosting, which was how she knew he meant it.


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment with her coat still on, considering the sink full of breakfast dishes, and decided that four years earned them one night of not pretending the place was cleaner than it was. She washed the dishes anyway, because otherwise Dev would do it at eleven at night, humming, and she'd feel guilty listening from bed.

He came in at six-forty with a paper bag and snow melting in his hair. "The good bakery was out of the almond thing," he said. "I got the pistachio thing. I'm told it's superior."

"By who?"

"A woman in line. She was very confident."

They cooked together, which they were bad at — the kitchen was too narrow, and they kept reaching for the same spoon — but they'd agreed years ago that going out on the anniversary felt like performing for an audience. Marisol seared the chicken. Dev cut the ends off the green beans with more precision than the task required, telling her about a coworker who had started an argument in a meeting about the definition of the word *quarterly*.

"You didn't get me anything," she said, not accusing. "We said no gifts."

"We did say that." He reached into his coat, hanging on the back of a chair, and set a small brass key on the counter. "Storage unit. Your grandmother's sewing machine. I picked it up from your mom in November. I've been paying eleven dollars a month to keep it a secret."

Marisol looked at the key for a while. Then she put down the tongs and kissed him, and the chicken got closer to done than either of them wanted.

Later they ate on the couch, plates on their knees, the pistachio thing split unevenly between them. Outside the snow kept coming. Neither of them said anything about next year. They didn't need to.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana's plan for grilling was dead. She stood in the kitchen doorway of their rented half-house in Cleveland Heights, watching water sheet down the window over the sink, and recalculated.

"We could still do it," Marcus said from the couch, where he was pretending to grade papers. "I'll hold an umbrella."

"You'll set the umbrella on fire."

"Probably." He set the stack of essays on the coffee table. "Skillet, then. I'll do the steaks in the cast iron, you do the potatoes."

Four years ago tonight they had eaten pad thai out of containers on the floor of his apartment because neither of them had wanted the night to end and neither of them had wanted to say so. They had marked the date every year since, always at home, always without much announcement. Once with a bottle of wine that turned out to be terrible. Once with a pizza and a power outage, which Dana still maintained was the best one.

She peeled the potatoes while he salted the meat, both of them working in the narrow galley kitchen, doing the small sidestepping dance of two people who had learned each other's habits in tight spaces. He put on the record she'd given him in year two, the Bill Withers, and she rolled her eyes and didn't ask him to change it.

"I got you something," he said, over the sound of the skillet coming up to heat.

"We said no gifts."

"You said no gifts. I nodded, which is different."

It was a small brass key, cut to fit the shed lock she'd been complaining about all summer. She laughed so hard she had to set down the peeler.

They ate at the table, not the floor, with the rain still going. Around nine he refilled her glass, and neither of them said anything about next year, because there wasn't any need to.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of the apartment for a moment with her keys still in her hand, taking stock: two weeks of mail on the counter, a coffee mug on the windowsill growing something. Six years ago tonight she had told Marcus, in the parking lot of a Applebee's in Dayton, that she thought she wanted to try this for real.

She cleared the mail into a drawer. She took the mug to the sink and decided not to look inside it.

Marcus came in at six-forty with a paper grocery bag and a bunch of grocery-store carnations, which he held up apologetically. "The roses were nineteen dollars. Nineteen."

"They're fine. They're good." She took them and put them in the water pitcher because she couldn't remember where the vase had gone in the last move.

He made the pasta. She was better at most cooking but he was better at this one sauce, which he'd learned from his aunt and which required standing over the pan and paying attention, and she liked watching him do it. She sat on the counter, which he had asked her not to do a hundred times, and told him about the woman at work who'd cried in the supply closet. He said that was rough. He asked if she'd said anything to her. Dana said she'd handed her a paper towel and left, and he laughed and said that was probably right.

They ate at the table instead of on the couch. Afterward they put on the show they were three seasons into and got about eleven minutes in before Marcus paused it.

"Six years," he said.

"Six years."

"You want to say something?"

Dana thought about it. "No," she said, and leaned into his shoulder. "Let's just watch it."

He unpaused it.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She'd left the office at four-thirty, claiming a dentist appointment, and spent the extra hour at the Korean market on Halsted buying short ribs and the good sesame oil, the kind in the glass bottle. Six years. Not a wedding anniversary — neither of them wanted one of those, or at least neither of them had brought it up in a way that required an answer — but the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when Marcus had walked her to the Blue Line and then, instead of saying goodnight, gotten on the train with her.

He came in at six with a bakery box and a bottle of wine he'd clearly asked someone about, because it wasn't the eleven-dollar Malbec he usually grabbed.

"You cooked," he said, accusatory.

"You brought cake."

"It's a tart." He set the box down and looked at the counter, the marinade, the scallions in a neat pile. "I was going to make the short ribs."

"I know. That's why I made them."

He laughed and put his hand on the back of her neck, briefly, the way he did. Then he took over the rice because she always let it scorch, and she opened the wine and put on the record he'd bought her two Christmases ago, the one with the scratch in the third song.

They ate at the actual table instead of the couch. Marcus told her about a coworker's disastrous divorce, and Dana said, "Sounds like a good argument for the status quo," and he said, "Is that what we're calling it," and she said, "For now," and neither of them pushed, because it was a good night and there'd be others.

Later she fell asleep against his shoulder during the movie. He didn't wake her until the credits.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. The bus had come early, the office had let out at four-thirty because half the department was already gone for the long weekend, and she found herself standing in the kitchen at five-fifteen with two hours of unexpected time.

She texted Miguel: *don't pick up anything on the way.*

*?????* he wrote back.

*just trust me*

What she had planned was not elaborate. Four years ago they'd met at a friend's cramped birthday party in Somerville, where the only food left had been a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa, and they had stood by the radiator eating it and talking about nothing until two in the morning. Every year since, they marked the date with chips and salsa, though the salsa had gotten better. This year she made it herself, seeding tomatoes at the counter, burning her thumb on a charred jalapeño.

Miguel came in at six-forty carrying a paper bag anyway.

"You said not to."

"I said trust you. I didn't agree to anything." He set the bag down and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Spanish red they always drank, plus a votive candle in a glass jar, the kind sold at the bodega on Warren Street. "For ambiance. Very romantic. Saint Jude on the side."

"Patron saint of lost causes."

"He's been very good to us."

They ate on the couch with the plates on the coffee table, because the kitchen table had become a place where mail lived. Miguel put on the playlist he'd made two years ago and never updated. Around nine, Dana pulled her feet under her and said, not for the first time, that they should really talk about the lease renewal, and Miguel said, not for the first time, that they should, and neither of them moved.

The candle burned down to a puddle. Outside, somebody's car alarm went off and stopped.


The rain had started around four, which meant Devin got home early; the site foreman sent everyone off when the concrete wouldn't set. He stood in the kitchen of their apartment in Fort Collins, still in his damp jacket, looking at the counter where he'd left the grocery list that morning.

Priya came in twenty minutes later, shaking water from her hair, laptop bag slung across her chest. "Did you get the bread?"

"I got the bread. I also got the wrong olives."

"There's no wrong olives."

"There are when you specifically said Castelvetrano."

She laughed and set her bag down, and he saw the tension go out of her shoulders the way it always did about ninety seconds after she came through the door. Four years ago tonight they'd shared a plate of nachos at a bar on College Avenue and argued about whether *The Big Lebowski* was overrated. She'd been the one to text first the next morning.

They had decided against going out. Reservations meant waiting, and waiting meant looking at their phones, and Priya had a deposition to prep for Monday anyway. So instead she chopped tomatoes while he browned the sausage, and they got in each other's way in the narrow galley kitchen, and he kept reaching around her for the salt.

"Move your elbow."

"You move your elbow. It's my elbow's kitchen too."

They ate on the couch with the good plates, the ones her mother had sent from Ohio. Devin had bought a bottle of Malbec that cost eighteen dollars, which felt reckless. Priya put on a record — the Emmylou Harris he pretended not to like — and told him about a witness who'd cried, and he told her about the foreman's dog.

Later she fell asleep against his shoulder before the second side finished. He let the needle run out. The rain kept going.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter and trying to remember what she'd planned. Right: the pasta. She'd bought the good pasta, the kind that cost four dollars for a box, and a jar of sauce she intended to doctor with garlic and a splash of the wine they'd open anyway.

Marcus texted from the train. *Delayed at Fordham Rd. 20 min?*

*Take your time*, she wrote, and then, because it was three years, *I love you.*

By the time he came through the door she had the water boiling and had found the candles from the power outage last February, stubby and mismatched, stuck into a pair of juice glasses. He laughed at them.

"They're romantic," she said.

"They're evidence of a crisis." He kissed her, still smelling like the outside, cold and faintly of the subway. Then he pulled a paper bag from his messenger bag: a small chocolate cake from the bakery near his office, slightly dented on one side.

"You said no presents."

"A cake isn't a present. A cake is dinner."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had his laptop and a spread of unopened mail on it. Dana had made the sauce better than she expected. Marcus said so twice. They talked about nothing much — his sister's new apartment, whether the upstairs neighbors had gotten a dog or just a very loud child — and then Dana asked if he remembered what they'd argued about that first week.

"The movie," he said. "You hated the movie."

"You defended it for forty-five minutes."

"I still would."

She leaned into his shoulder. The candles were burning unevenly, wax pooling in the juice glasses. Neither of them got up to fix it. Outside, a bus sighed at the corner, and the radiator knocked twice, and that was the whole evening.


The Fourth of March

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of their apartment with her coat still on, looking at the kitchen the way you look at a room you're about to change, and then she started moving.

By the time Marcus came in at six-forty, shaking rain off his jacket, there was a pot of something on the stove and the good plates out—the ones from his grandmother, which they used maybe twice a year.

"You cooked," he said.

"I attempted." She was scowling at a saucepan. "The sauce broke. I don't know what that means but the internet says it broke."

He set a paper bag on the counter and looked over her shoulder. "It's fine. Add a little water, whisk it."

"You add water and whisk it. I've been whisking for eleven minutes and I'm emotionally finished."

He took the whisk. She took the bag, peered inside, and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Portuguese wine they'd drunk on the night in question, four years ago, sitting on the hood of her car in a Kroger parking lot because neither of them wanted the night to end.

"You remembered the label," she said.

"I remembered the headache."

They ate at the table instead of on the couch. The sauce was thin but the chicken was good. Marcus told her about a coworker's disastrous meeting; Dana told him her mother had called twice that day, both times about nothing, both times ending with *and how's Marcus.*

"She wants a wedding," he said.

"She wants a reason to buy a hat."

Afterward they moved to the couch after all, the plates soaking in the sink, some documentary about volcanoes playing that neither of them followed. Dana put her feet in his lap. Outside the rain kept on, steady, unremarkable, and they stayed where they were a long while.


The forecast promised rain, which suited them fine.

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She toed off her shoes in the entryway and stood for a second in the quiet of the apartment, the radiator ticking, the window over the sink gone gray with early dusk. Four years. It seemed both impossible and unremarkable, like most true things.

She had the chicken out of the fridge and a lemon on the cutting board when Marcus came in shaking water off his jacket.

"It's doing that thing where it isn't quite raining but you're wet anyway," he said. He set a paper bag on the counter and kissed the top of her head, then her mouth, briefly, tasting of the cold.

"What's in the bag?"

"Nothing. Don't look in the bag."

She looked in the bag. A pint of the pistachio gelato from the place on Vermont, and a bottle of the middling Rioja they always bought because they'd once had it on a trip to Chicago and had decided it was theirs.

"You remembered the gelato."

"I remembered the gelato four years ago," he said. "It's my one trick."

He took over the lemon. She put on the record her brother had given them, the one with the scratch in the second track that they now considered part of the song. They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a place where mail lived. Marcus told her about the argument in his department meeting. Dana told him she'd finally called her mother back.

Later, with the plates stacked in the sink and the rain finally committing to itself against the window, he asked what she was thinking.

"That I don't want to go anywhere," she said.

"That's convenient." He pulled the blanket over both of them. "Neither do I."


The rain started around four, which meant Dana came home with her hair flattened to her forehead and her canvas shoes making small unhappy sounds on the entry tile. Marcus was already at the stove, sleeves shoved past his elbows, arguing quietly with a pan of scallops.

"Three years," he said, not turning around. "Did you know that on the third anniversary you're supposed to give leather?"

"That's for married people." Dana peeled off her cardigan and hung it on the doorknob, which he had asked her not to do eleven hundred times. "Also, you're going to overcook those."

"I am aware of the scallops' situation."

She came up behind him and looked over his shoulder anyway. They'd met at a mutual friend's disastrous housewarming, where the oven had caught fire and they'd ended up eating cold cheese on the fire escape for two hours. Every year since, they'd made a point of cooking something that could go wrong.

Dana opened the wine, a nine-dollar Portuguese red they'd found last spring and bought a case of. She poured two glasses and set one by his elbow, then went to move the pile of unopened mail off the small table by the window. She lit the candle her sister had given them, which smelled aggressively of fig.

"That candle is a war crime," Marcus said.

"It's ambiance." She sat down and pulled her damp socks off, tucking her feet under her. "Tell me the plan."

"Dinner. Then that documentary about the guy who built the boat."

"And then?"

"And then I was thinking we don't do anything. I was thinking that's the point."

The scallops were, in fact, slightly overcooked. They ate them anyway, with the rain going hard against the window and the fig candle burning down, and Dana reached across at some point and held his wrist for no particular reason, and he let her.


The Sixth of October

Dana got home first, which almes never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, doing the math on the chicken thighs in the fridge and the fact that Marcus wouldn't be off the bus until six thirty.

She texted him: *don't pick up anything. i'm handling it.*

*Suspicious,* he wrote back. *You said that last year and we ate cereal.*

*Last year I had strep.*

She browned the thighs in the cast iron, the one his mother had given them when they moved in together, seasoned now by two years of their own cooking. Rice, the green beans that were slightly past their prime but fine if she blistered them. Nothing ambitious. They'd agreed on that: no reservations, no gifts over twenty dollars, no pressure.

Marcus came in at six forty with rain on his shoulders and a paper bag he tried to hide behind his back.

"That's a gift."

"It's a technicality." He set it on the counter — a bottle of the cheap Portuguese wine they'd drunk on the night in question, three years ago, in his old apartment with the radiator that clanked. "Nine dollars. Well under."

"I was going to say something about how I didn't get you anything, but I did." She nodded at the bookshelf, where a small envelope leaned against the spines. "It's a coupon. For a haircut. From me. Which is worthless, because I don't know how to cut hair."

"So it's a threat."

"It's an offer."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt ceremonial enough. Marcus talked about a coworker's divorce and then apologized for talking about a divorce. Dana said she didn't mind, they weren't superstitious, and then knocked twice on the wood anyway.

Afterward he washed and she dried, and they finished the wine standing up, leaning against opposite counters, arguing amiably about whether the radiator had clanked or hissed.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still wearing her coat, taking inventory: a bag of shallots, the good butter, the bottle of Chianti she'd hidden behind the cereal boxes three weeks ago so she wouldn't drink it on some ordinary Tuesday.

Four years. It seemed like a number that should feel bigger.

She was halfway through peeling the shallots when Marcus came in, and she heard him stop in the doorway.

"You cooked," he said.

"I'm cooking. Present tense. Don't get excited yet."

He set a paper sack on the counter and started unpacking it — a wedge of Gruyère, a baguette, a small white box tied with string.

Dana pointed the paring knife at the box. "What's that."

"Cannoli. From the place on Wexford."

"You drove to Wexford."

"I drove to Wexford." He was already rolling up his sleeves, already reaching past her for the cutting board, and she moved over without being asked, the way you do after four years of sharing eleven hundred square feet. "You want me to do the mushrooms?"

"I want you to do the mushrooms and not talk about work."

"I wasn't going to talk about work."

"You were composing a sentence about work. I could see it happening."

He laughed and started slicing. They worked mostly in silence, the radio on low, and at some point she noticed he'd put on the shirt she liked, the soft gray one with the frayed collar, which was as close as Marcus ever came to ceremony.

They ate at the actual table instead of the couch. Halfway through, he refilled her glass and said, "Four years ago tonight you told me you didn't date guys who liked that band."

"I lied," Dana said. "Obviously."

Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped. Neither of them got up to look.


Maya got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of their apartment with her keys still in her hand, taking stock: the dishes from breakfast, the laundry basket that had been sitting in the hallway since Sunday, the general sense of a place where two people were always slightly behind.

Four years. It seemed like it should feel longer, or maybe shorter. She wasn't sure which.

She put on the pasta water and dealt with the laundry basket. When she heard Danny's key in the lock, she was crouched in front of the refrigerator, trying to determine whether the mushrooms were still acceptable.

"They're fine," he said, looking over her shoulder. "That's just how mushrooms look."

"That's what you said about the peppers."

"The peppers were an outlier." He set a paper bag on the counter and pulled out a bottle of wine, the good kind, not the eleven-dollar kind. "Also I got that bread from the place on Sullivan. There was a line, so I feel like a hero."

"You are a hero." She stood up, kissed him, and handed him the mushrooms. "Slice."

They cooked without much of a plan, the way they always did. Danny put on a record. Maya burned the garlic slightly and blamed the pan. Somewhere in the middle of it, they stopped and stood in the kitchen for a while, drinking the wine and not saying anything in particular.

"Do you remember what we did the first year?" she asked.

"You made reservations at that Italian place and I got food poisoning."

"That wasn't the food. You had a stomach bug."

"Agree to disagree."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt appropriately ceremonial. Later they moved to the couch anyway. The record ended and neither of them got up to flip it.


Dana got home first, which was unusual. She kicked off her shoes by the door, stood in the quiet of the apartment, and did the math on her phone: four years since the night at Ruthie's bar when Sam had spilled half a beer on her jacket and then talked to her until closing.

She had planned nothing. Neither of them had mentioned it, which she'd taken to mean they'd both silently agreed to let it pass, the way they'd let her birthday pass with takeout and a movie. But standing there in her socks, she felt a small stubborn urge to mark it.

There was a chicken in the fridge, half a bag of fingerling potatoes, a lemon going soft. She started cutting.

Sam came in at six-forty smelling like the outdoors, holding a paper bag against his chest with both arms like something fragile.

"You cooked," he said.

"You bought something."

He set the bag down and pulled out a bottle of the pinot they'd had in Sonoma, plus a box of the salted caramels from the shop on Ninth that she pretended not to love. "I wasn't sure if we were doing anything."

"Neither was I. Apparently we were both doing something."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. The chicken was slightly dry. Sam said it wasn't, then admitted it was, then had seconds anyway. Dana told the story of the beer on the jacket and he insisted, as he always did, that she had bumped into him.

Afterward they didn't put on a movie. They sat with the wine and the caramels and the window open, and Sam rubbed the arch of her foot without being asked, and she told him about the job posting she'd been thinking about, the one in Portland, and he listened for a long time before he said anything.


The rain started around four, which meant Deb came home from the clinic with her scrubs damp at the shoulders and her hair frizzing at the temples. She found Marcus already in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up, working a knife through a shallot with more care than speed.

"Four years," he said, without looking up.

"Four years since you spilled beer on my shoes."

"That was a bonding experience."

She kissed the back of his neck and went to change. When she came back in sweatpants, she took over the shallot situation, because Marcus's dice were more of a suggestion than a shape. He didn't argue. He moved to the stereo instead, scrolling past his own preferences until he found the Al Green record she liked, the one she'd played the first morning she ever stayed over in his old apartment on Ashland.

They'd agreed: no restaurant. No fussing. Reservations meant waiting in a vestibule with other couples performing romance at each other. Instead there was a chicken Marcus had rubbed with paprika at noon, and a bottle of wine Deb had been saving in the closet since her sister's wedding, and the good plates that only came out three or four times a year.

He asked about her day and she told him about the beagle with the sock in its stomach, and he laughed in the right place, and then he said his mother had called again about Thanksgiving, and about whether they were ever going to, you know.

"Do you want to?" Deb asked. She was honest enough to sound curious rather than cornered.

"Someday. Not tonight."

"Good. Tonight I want to eat that chicken."

They ate at the small table by the window with the rain going. Afterward Marcus washed and Deb dried, and they argued mildly about a movie, and settled on the couch under the same blanket, and fell asleep before the end of it.


The Third of October

Nadia got home first, which almus meant she'd be the one to figure out dinner. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the half-bag of arborio rice on the counter and doing math about how long risotto took versus how hungry she was.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus: *Stuck behind an accident on Halsted. 20 min?*

*Fine. Bring wine, we're out.*

*Already have it. Been in my trunk since Tuesday.*

She smiled at that — the small conspiracy of it, both of them pretending they'd forgotten and neither of them forgetting. Four years since a bad party in Logan Square where he'd been the only person willing to talk about anything other than commercial real estate.

She put on the stock to warm. Found the good candles, the ones from her sister, still in tissue paper in the buffet drawer. Set two places, then moved them from across the table to beside each other, then moved them back, feeling silly.

Marcus came in with a bottle of Sancerre and a paper bag from the Italian place on Ashland — a small container of tiramisu, sweating slightly. "In case cooking felt like work," he said.

"It felt like work about eight minutes ago." She handed him the wooden spoon. "Stir. Constantly. That's the whole thing."

He stirred badly, adding stock too fast, and she let him. She leaned against the counter and told him about the meeting where her director had called her "Natalie" twice. He told her about the accident, the two men who'd been shouting in the street, how one of them was crying.

They ate late. The risotto was slightly gluey and they finished all of it. Around ten, Marcus refilled her glass without asking and said, "Same time next year?"

"You always say that like it's a question."

"It's a bit," he said. "You like the bit."

She did.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Daniel got the candles lit, which felt like a small victory in a day that had otherwise involved a flat tire and a conference call that ran ninety minutes long.

"You didn't have to do the tablecloth," Priya said from the doorway, still in her work clothes, her badge lanyard hanging crooked. "We've eaten off placemats for four years."

"Five, as of today."

"Five." She set her bag down and came over to look at what he'd made. Chicken curry, the recipe from his mother that he'd finally gotten the timing right on, and a plate of naan he'd absolutely bought from the grocery store and would not be pretending otherwise. "You started this at what, six?"

"Five-thirty. I cheated on the bread."

"I can see the bag in the trash." She kissed the side of his neck and went to change.

They'd talked about going out. There was a place downtown with a tasting menu that a coworker of hers wouldn't stop recommending, but it required reservations three weeks out and a certain amount of enthusiasm neither of them had been able to summon. Priya had said, over coffee on Sunday, that what she actually wanted was to not put on real pants. Daniel had agreed immediately.

She came back in sweatpants and one of his old shirts and poured them both wine, more into his glass than hers because she'd be up early. They ate slowly. She told him about the audit. He told her about the tire, and about the man at the shop who'd tried to sell him a whole new set.

Afterward she washed and he dried, hips bumping in the narrow kitchen, and she said, "Same thing next year?"

"Same thing," he said, "but I'll make the bread."

She laughed. "You will not."

He didn't argue. He put the plates away, and they went to find something to watch.


The rain started around four, which meant Danny's plan to grill was dead. He stood at the kitchen window with a beer, watching water pool in the low spot of the patio where he kept meaning to fix the drainage.

"We could still do it," Priya said behind him. She'd changed out of her work clothes into the gray sweatshirt with the bleach stain, which he took as a good sign. Six years ago tonight she'd have never let him see her in it.

"In the rain?"

"You have an umbrella."

"I'm not grilling under an umbrella like some kind of maniac."

She came up beside him and looked out. "So what, then. We order something?"

"I bought steaks."

"Then cook the steaks in the pan. The cast iron one. You did it in February and I liked it better anyway."

He turned to look at her. "You liked it better?"

"I've been sitting on that for eight months."

They did it together, eventually. She peeled potatoes badly at the sink while he got the pan smoking so hard the alarm went off, and he stood on a chair fanning it with a dish towel while she laughed at him, and then she wanted to know why he'd bought a bottle of wine that cost thirty dollars when they'd agreed on a quiet night.

"Quiet doesn't mean cheap."

"It kind of does."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which was the concession to the occasion. Halfway through, Priya asked whether he remembered what they'd eaten the first night, and he said pad thai from the place on Grand that closed, and she said no, that was the second time, the first time was nothing, they just walked around.

"We walked around for three hours," he said.

"You wouldn't shut up about your dissertation."

"You asked."

"I was being polite."

He refilled her glass. Outside the rain kept going, steady and unhurried, and neither of them got up to close the window.


The Fourth of March

Dana got home first, which was unusual. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *don't make plans, I mean it* — and felt a small satisfaction that Marcus hadn't moved it.

She had the shrimp thawing in a bowl of cold water when he came in, shaking rain off his jacket.

"Seven years," he said.

"Seven years since you spilled beer on my shoes."

"That was a bonding experience." He set a paper bag on the counter and pulled out a bottle of the cheap prosecco they'd bought the first time they'd celebrated this, when they were twenty-four and had no furniture. "I couldn't find the exact one. This is close."

"It's the same label."

"It's a different vintage."

"Marcus, it's four dollars. There is no vintage."

He laughed and reached around her for the cutting board. They cooked without talking much — she peeled the shrimp, he cut garlic too thick, the way he always did, and she didn't correct him, the way she always didn't. The rain picked up against the window over the sink. Somebody's car alarm went off down the block and stopped.

They ate on the couch because the table had become a place where mail lived. Dana put her feet in his lap.

"I've been thinking," he said, "about whether we should do something bigger. A trip. Something."

"Do you want to?"

He considered it honestly, which was one of the things she liked about him. "No," he said. "I want this."

"Good." She nudged him with her heel. "Because I already told Priya we weren't coming Saturday."

"You planned this whole thing days ago."

"I plan everything days ago. You've met me."

He refilled her glass. Outside, the rain kept on, and neither of them got up to close the blinds.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana's plan to grill was finished. She stood at the sliding door with her phone in one hand, scrolling through her contacts as if a solution might be hiding there.

"We could order from Nico's," Ben said from the couch, where he'd been pretending to read for twenty minutes. He'd been home since noon, having taken the afternoon off without telling her, which had seemed romantic in the planning stage and now just felt like an odd gap in the day.

"Three years and we get delivery pizza."

"Three years and we don't have to leave the house." He set the book down. "Look, I have a thing."

"A thing."

He went to the hall closet and came back with a paper bag, folded over at the top the way his mother always folded bags. Inside was a bottle of the terrible sparkling wine they'd bought at a gas station in Missouri, the first trip they'd taken together, when the car overheated outside Rolla and they'd sat on the guardrail for two hours waiting on a tow.

Dana laughed. "You've been hiding this?"

"Since February. I kept moving it so you wouldn't find it."

She found the pasta in the back of the pantry and the jar of sauce she'd been saving for a night when neither of them cooked. Ben cleared the table, which mostly meant relocating a stack of mail and a dying basil plant. He put on the record she'd given him last Christmas and turned it down low enough that they could hear the rain.

The wine was as bad as they remembered. They drank it anyway, out of the mismatched glasses, and Dana told the Rolla story wrong on purpose so he'd correct her, which he did, thoroughly, the way she'd known he would.

Later they left the dishes and watched the storm move east across the neighbors' roofs.


The rain had started around four, which meant Dana got home from the clinic with wet shoes and a bag of groceries that had gone soft at the bottom. Nate was already in the kitchen, sleeves shoved up, doing something aggressive to a head of garlic with the flat of a knife.

"You're early," she said.

"I left at five on the dot. Marcus gave me a look." He took the bag from her, peered inside. "Did you get the good butter?"

"I got the butter that was there."

Four years ago tonight they'd met at a friend's cramped birthday party in Somerville and talked for two hours in a stairwell about nothing—buses, mostly, and a movie neither of them had actually finished. They'd agreed early on not to make a production of the date. No reservations, no gifts over twenty dollars. It had started as a joke about being broke and calcified into something they both quietly liked.

Dana changed into sweatpants and came back to peel potatoes while Nate seared the chicken. She kept stealing pieces of the parsley he'd chopped.

"Stop."

"It's a garnish. It's decorative. You have plenty."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which was the concession to ceremony. Nate had found a bottle of wine in the back of the closet from a wedding they'd gone to in Vermont, and it was mediocre, and they drank it anyway. She told him about a kid at the clinic who'd named his own splint. He told her his mother had called twice about Thanksgiving.

Afterward she washed and he dried, and the rain kept on, and the radiator in the hallway made its knocking sound.

"Same thing next year?" he said.

"Same thing." She handed him a plate. "Maybe get the good butter."


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, assessing: the counter cluttered with mail, the sink holding two mugs and a bowl gone crusty. Six years ago tonight she'd told Micah, in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, that she wanted to try being with him. Neither of them had planned anything since.

She texted him: *don't stop for takeout. I'm cooking.*

He wrote back: *since when do you cook*

*since tonight*

What she actually did was defrost the chicken thighs he'd bought on Sunday and look up a recipe on her phone, propping it against the toaster. By the time his key turned in the lock she had onions going and had only mildly burned the garlic.

Micah came in holding a grocery bag and a bunch of tulips wrapped in wet paper towel. "I got these before I saw your text," he said. "The flowers, I mean. The bag's just ice cream. That still works, right?"

"That still works."

He put the tulips in a pint glass because they didn't own a vase, and then he cleaned the sink without being asked, which she noticed and decided not to comment on. They ate at the table instead of on the couch. The chicken was fine. The rice was better.

"Do you remember what you said to me?" she asked. "In the parking lot."

"You said it. I just stood there."

"You said 'okay, good.' Like I'd handed you a receipt."

Micah laughed. "I was terrified."

Afterward they took the ice cream to the couch after all, one spoon each, straight from the carton. They put on the second half of a movie they'd abandoned in October and Dana fell asleep against his shoulder before the end of it, and Micah, who had been waiting all day to sit down, let her.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her coat still on, taking stock: the dishes from breakfast, the mail avalanche on the counter, the wilted basil plant they kept promising to save.

Four years. Four years since the night they'd walked from the bar to the taco place to her old apartment on Fulton, talking the whole way about nothing that either of them could remember now.

She got the dishes done and the mail sorted into two piles, important and probably-not. Then she opened the fridge and considered the chicken thighs she'd bought Tuesday with vague intentions.

Marcus came in at six twenty, kicked off his shoes, and said, "Don't cook."

"I wasn't going to. I was thinking about it."

"I got the Thai place. The good one, not the close one." He held up the bag like evidence. "Panang for you, extra sauce, I made them write it down."

"You're a decent man."

"I'm an adequate man who remembered one thing."

They ate on the couch because the table had become a place where the printer lived. Marcus poured the wine into the mismatched glasses—the nice one had broken in September—and Dana put on the playlist she'd been quietly adding to for a week, songs from the year they met, which turned out to be mostly embarrassing.

"This song," Marcus said. "This song was on in the car when you told me you hated my apartment."

"I said it had potential."

"You said it smelled like a hamster."

"It did smell like a hamster."

Later they moved to the floor by the radiator, which was the warmest spot in the apartment, and Dana leaned back against his chest and they talked about whether to go to her sister's for Thanksgiving, and about the basil, and about whether four years was a long time or no time at all. Neither of them decided.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, doing the math: four years since the night they'd walked from the bar to the taco place and then, inexplicably, to the reservoir, where Miguel had told her about his grandmother's mango tree in Ponce until the sky went gray.

She'd bought scallops. She'd never cooked scallops. The internet said the pan had to be screaming hot.

Miguel came in at 6:40, smelling like the train, holding a paper bag against his chest like it might escape. "Don't look."

"I'm literally looking at you."

"At the bag." He set it on the counter behind the toaster and kissed the side of her head, then noticed the scallops thawing in a colander. "Oh no. Are we being fancy?"

"We're being medium," she said. "You're on wine and music. And you have to tell me if these are rubber."

They worked around each other in a kitchen too small for two people, which was the whole problem with the apartment and also the reason they'd stayed. He put on the Bill Withers record his brother had given them and poured wine into the two glasses that matched. She burned the first scallop, swore, adjusted, and got the rest golden.

They ate on the couch because the table had bills on it. The scallops were good. He said so twice, then produced the paper bag: a small framed photo of the reservoir, taken on his phone, printed at the drugstore, the frame slightly crooked.

"You went to the reservoir," she said.

"Tuesday. On my lunch."

Dana held it a while. Then she leaned into him, and they stayed there, the record turning, the dishes waiting, four years old and unhurried.


The Fourth of December

Nora got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment with her coat still on, taking in the sink full of dishes from breakfast and the laundry basket that had been sitting in the hallway since Sunday. Then she set down the grocery bag and started with the dishes.

Daniel came in at six-forty, forty minutes late, holding a paper-wrapped bundle of tulips that had clearly been the last ones at the corner market. Two of the stems were bent.

"They looked better in the bucket," he said.

"They look fine." She took them and put them in the glass pitcher, because they'd never gotten around to buying a vase. "Three years."

"Three years." He hung up his coat and looked at the counter. "You bought scallops."

"I bought scallops. You're cooking them, because I don't know how."

So he cooked them, badly at first — the pan wasn't hot enough and the first two stuck — while she sat on the counter with a glass of the wine they'd been saving since her promotion in August and read him a text from his mother that he'd been ignoring all day.

"She wants to know if we're coming for Christmas."

"Tell her we're discussing it."

"We're not discussing it."

"We're discussing it right now," he said, and flipped a scallop.

They ate at the small table by the window with the overhead light off, just the lamp, because the overhead light made the room look like a waiting room. Outside it had started to sleet. Daniel talked about a coworker's divorce. Nora described, in detail, a dog she'd seen on the train.

Later, on the couch, she put her feet in his lap.

"Same thing next year?" he said.

"Something like it," she said, and meant it as a promise.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they usually dumped mail and keys, and decided that tonight it would be clear. She swept the junk into a drawer, then texted Marcus: *don't stop for takeout.*

He wrote back a question mark, then, a minute later, *too late, I'm in line at Han's.*

So they had dumplings, which was fine—it was what they'd eaten on the actual night three years ago, sitting on the floor of her old apartment because she hadn't owned a table yet. Dana found the good plates, the ones from his grandmother, and put them out anyway.

Marcus came in shaking rain off his jacket. "You cleaned."

"I cleared. There's a difference."

He set the bag down and looked at the plates, then at her, and something in his face softened in a way that still got her, three years in. "I got the pork ones and the shrimp ones. I couldn't remember which you—"

"Both. That's why we always get both."

They ate at the table with the overhead light off and a candle Dana had found in the bathroom cabinet, unscented, probably left over from a power outage. Marcus poured wine into the only two matching glasses they owned. He talked about a coworker's disastrous meeting; she told him about the dog she'd seen wearing four separate raincoats.

Later she asked if he remembered what he'd said that first night, and he said no, and she said good, because it had been terrible. He asked what it was. She wouldn't tell him. He tried to bribe her with the last shrimp dumpling and she took it and still wouldn't tell him.

They did the dishes together, badly, and went to bed early, and the candle burned down on the table until Marcus got up to blow it out.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter, and decided the pasta could wait. She texted Marcus: *don't pick up anything, I've got it.*

He wrote back: *too late.*

He came in twenty minutes later with a paper bag from the Italian place on Sherman and a bottle of wine that had clearly been chosen fast, under fluorescent lights, by a man who knew nothing about wine and refused to ask.

"You said you had it," he said.

"I did have it. I have a box of linguine and one questionable tomato."

"Then I've saved us."

Four years. They had never quite agreed on the date — she counted from the night in her old apartment when the heat was broken and they'd stayed up until four talking about their fathers; he counted from a week earlier, a movie neither of them watched. They had settled on hers, mostly because he'd lost the argument and then discovered he liked losing it.

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus put on the record she'd given him two Christmases ago, and Dana pulled her feet up under her and told him about the woman at work who'd started keeping a live fish in a mason jar on her desk.

"That's a small jar," he said.

"It's a very small fish."

Later, plates stacked in the sink, he asked if she'd wanted something bigger — a reservation, candles, something.

"No," she said. She meant it, and he could tell she meant it, which was somehow the better gift.

Outside, a car alarm went off and then thought better of it. Dana leaned against him. The record ended and neither of them got up to turn it over.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, calculating: forty minutes before Marcus's bus, maybe fifty if the 14 was running slow, which it always was on Thursdays.

She'd bought the good pasta, the kind from the Italian place on Sheridan that cost four dollars a bag and made her feel briefly like a person with a functional life. Three years. Three years since the party where he'd cornered her by the bookshelf and asked, with what she now recognized as terror, whether she'd read the Alice Munro on the shelf behind her.

By the time the key turned, she had the water boiling and the wine open. Marcus came in carrying a paper bag, saw her, and stopped.

"You said you were working late."

"I lied," Dana said. "Badly, I assume."

"No, it was solid." He set the bag on the counter and pulled out a container of tiramisu and a bundle of ranunculus, slightly crushed. "I was going to have this all arranged. Candles. Ambiance."

"We have two candles and they're both citronella."

"Ambiance," he repeated, and kissed her temple.

They ate at the coffee table because the actual table had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus told her about the argument he'd lost at work. Dana told him her sister had called again about Thanksgiving, and they both made the face they made about Thanksgiving.

"Three years," he said.

"Three years." She refilled his glass. "Do you feel like we should be further along? People keep asking me things."

"People are relentless." He considered it. "I feel like we're exactly here."

She thought about that, turning it over. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."

They put on the show they were halfway through and didn't finish the episode.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia had to change her plan.

She'd wanted to eat on the balcony, but the plastic chairs were already slick, so she carried the folding table in from the hallway closet and set it up in the living room instead. Two mismatched plates. The good napkins her mother had given them, still creased from the package.

Marcus came in at five-thirty with his jacket dark across the shoulders and a paper bag under one arm.

"You said no gifts," Delia said.

"It's not a gift. It's bread." He held it up. "The place on Wexler had the seeded kind. I stood in line behind a guy buying eleven baguettes. Eleven."

"For what?"

"I didn't ask. Some things you don't want to know."

She'd made the chicken thing with lemon and olives, the one she'd botched twice before figuring out the oven ran hot. It was in the oven now, and the apartment smelled like it, which she considered the whole point of cooking in the first place.

Marcus tore the bread instead of slicing it. He always did. She'd stopped mentioning it around year two.

"Four years," he said, sitting down. "Feels like more."

"That's not the compliment you think it is."

"It absolutely is." He poured the wine, a little too full, the way he did. "Four years ago you told me you had to leave at nine and then you didn't leave until Sunday."

"I had a toothbrush in my bag."

"I know. I saw it. I decided not to say anything."

They ate slowly. The rain kept up against the window, and someone upstairs was moving furniture, or possibly bowling. Delia put her bare foot on top of his under the table, and Marcus didn't comment on it, just shifted to make room, and reached for more bread.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen of their apartment with her coat still on, considering the counter: three days of mail, a cutting board she'd meant to wash, the good bottle of wine they'd been saving since Nick's promotion in March.

Four years. Not their wedding anniversary — they weren't married, and had stopped fielding questions about it around year two — but the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when Nick had walked her to her car after a work thing and neither of them had gotten in.

She was chopping shallots when he came through the door.

"You beat me," he said, sounding wounded. "I have a whole plan."

"Your plan is the same as my plan."

"My plan is more elaborate." He set down a grocery bag and pulled out mushrooms, cream, a baguette that had clearly ridden home under his arm. "Also I got the cake from the place on Fulton."

"The lemon one?"

"Obviously the lemon one."

They cooked around each other in a kitchen too narrow for two, which they had learned to do without commentary. Nick handled the sauce. Dana ran water in the pan she'd been meaning to wash and did not mention that he'd bought shallots when she'd texted that she was buying shallots. He turned on a playlist she'd made in 2021, back when making playlists was still something they did for each other.

They ate at the table instead of the couch, a concession to the occasion. Nick told a long story about his brother. Dana refilled both glasses.

"Same thing next year?" she said.

He thought about it, and she watched him think about it, and something in her chest went tight and then loosened.

"Yeah," he said. "Maybe with a bigger kitchen."

Later they left the dishes and watched half a movie, and she fell asleep against his shoulder before the plot resolved.


The rain had started around four, so Nadia texted Owen from the pharmacy: *Change of plans? Nobody wants to walk twelve blocks in this.*

*Already ahead of you,* he wrote back. *Got the good pasta.*

By the time she got home, he had the windows cracked despite the weather, because the apartment always overheated in November and he claimed the smell of rain improved everything. He was chopping garlic badly, the way he always did, in uneven chunks.

"Four years," she said, hanging her coat on the radiator knob. "Four years and you still won't let me teach you the claw grip."

"The claw grip is a scam." He handed her a glass of the Chianti they'd been saving since August, when they'd bought it on impulse in a shop near her sister's place. "Your turn. Salad or music?"

"Music. You've been picking for weeks and it's all become very sad."

"It's fall."

She put on the Motown playlist instead, and he didn't complain, which she took as an anniversary concession. While the water came to a boil they moved around each other in the kitchen with the easy choreography of people who had learned exactly where the other's elbows would be — she reaching past him for the colander, him stepping back without looking.

Over dinner they did the thing they did every year: recounting the first night, disagreeing about the details. He insisted she'd asked for his number. She insisted he'd written it on a receipt and pushed it across the table like a spy.

"You kept the receipt," he said.

"I did not."

"It's in the shoebox. With the ticket stubs."

She refilled his glass rather than answer.

Afterward they left the dishes and sat on the floor by the radiator, the record still going, her feet in his lap, the rain steady against the glass. Neither of them suggested going out. Neither of them wanted to.


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel's plan to grill was finished. He stood at the kitchen window watching water sheet down the glass and considered his options.

"We could still do it," Priya said from the doorway. She'd come home early, her work bag still hooked over one shoulder. "You could stand out there with an umbrella. Very romantic."

"Six years and you want me electrocuted."

"Six years and you're still dramatic." She set the bag down and came to look at the salmon thawing on the counter. "Pan-sear it. Do the lemon thing."

"The lemon thing takes butter I don't have."

"I bought butter Tuesday." She opened the fridge, found it behind the oat milk, and held it up like evidence.

They cooked with the radio on, the classical station Priya's mother had gotten her hooked on. Daniel handled the fish. Priya washed and tore lettuce, then argued briefly for anchovies in the dressing, then won. Neither of them mentioned that this was the sixth year running that something had gone slightly wrong with the plan — the year of the power outage, the year she'd gotten food poisoning from a food truck at lunch, the year his sister showed up unannounced from Baltimore.

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which was the only real concession to the occasion. Priya had bought a bottle of the Grenache they'd liked in Sonoma. Daniel gave her a card he'd written that morning at his desk, in handwriting that got worse toward the bottom of the page.

"You spelled 'genuinely' wrong," she said.

"I know. I saw it after."

She read it twice anyway, then set it against the salt shaker so it stood up.

Later they did the dishes together, one washing, one drying, the rain still going, and Daniel said something about next year, maybe a cabin, and Priya said maybe, and neither of them meant it as a promise or needed it to be.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where the mail had piled up for three days, and decided the mail could wait one more.

She had bought the ingredients on Sunday and hidden them behind the seltzer: two ribeyes, a bag of fingerling potatoes, the expensive butter. Four years ago tonight, she and Marcus had walked out of a terrible bar on Delancey and kept walking for two more hours, and somewhere around Houston Street it had stopped being a first date.

He texted at 6:40. *Stuck behind a jackknifed truck. 20 min.*

*Take your time,* she wrote. *Don't eat anything.*

The potatoes were roasting when she heard his key. He came in with a paper bag under one arm and rain in his hair.

"You cooked," he said.

"You brought something."

"I brought two things." He set the bag down and produced a bottle of the Malbec they'd had in Mendoza, which had been ridiculous to find and more ridiculous to pay for, and then a second, smaller item wrapped in tissue paper.

"We said no gifts."

"You said no gifts. I nodded, which is different."

It was a framed photograph, badly taken, of the two of them squinting on a subway platform in 2021, her hair still short, his shirt still that awful green.

"Where did you even get this?"

"Your sister. She's been sitting on it for a year."

Dana propped it against the toaster. Marcus took over the steaks because he was better at them and she let him, leaning against the counter with her wine, telling him about her impossible client, and he laughed in the right places and then salted things without asking, the way he always did.

They ate at the table instead of the couch. It felt like an occasion. It was.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they'd left the breakfast dishes, and decided she had forty-five minutes.

By the time Micah's key turned in the lock, she had the sink empty, the good plates out—the ones from his grandmother, mismatched and heavy—and a pan of chicken thighs sputtering under the broiler.

"You cooked," he said, in the tone of someone confirming a rumor.

"I assembled." She kissed him. He smelled like the print shop, ink and warm paper. "Four years."

"Four years." He set a paper bag on the table and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Portuguese red they'd bought the first time they went grocery shopping together, back when neither of them had known the other took milk in coffee. "And I found the exact one. Same label."

"You went to three stores."

"I went to two stores and made a phone call, which is more impressive."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt slightly ceremonial and slightly absurd. Dana had made a playlist and then abandoned it halfway through dinner in favor of arguing about whether their anniversary was the night of the party or the following Tuesday, when he'd actually called her.

"The party," she said. "You walked me to my car."

"I walked you to the wrong car. You let me."

"I was being polite."

Afterward he washed and she dried, hips bumping, the radiator knocking in the other room. She thought about the box in her sock drawer, the one with his mother's ring in it, and how she wasn't ready to open that conversation tonight—not out of doubt, just because tonight was already full.

"Cake?" Micah said.

"There's cake?"

"There's a grocery store cupcake with the frosting scraped off, because I know you."

She laughed and took it, and they split it standing up.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her keys still in her hand, looking at the counter where the mail had piled up for three days, and decided that was the first thing.

By the time Marcus came in at six-forty, the counter was clear, the recycling was out, and there was a bag from the Italian place on Sixth sitting on the stove.

"You got the ravioli," he said.

"I got the ravioli. And the bread, but they only had the sesame kind."

"I like the sesame kind."

"You tolerate the sesame kind." She took the wine out of the paper sleeve. "Four years."

"Four years." He set his laptop bag down by the door instead of on the table, which he knew she noticed, and went to wash his hands. "I have something, but it's stupid."

"How stupid."

"Medium."

He came back with a shoebox from the closet, and inside it were the ticket stubs. All of them, apparently, since the beginning — the movie they'd walked out of, the minor league game where it rained, a folded receipt from the diner in Asheville. He'd been putting them somewhere and she'd never known where.

Dana sat down on the floor with the box in her lap and went through them slowly while he plated the ravioli badly.

"I got you a sweater," she said. "It's in the bedroom. It's grey."

"I need a grey sweater."

"You have four grey sweaters."

"Then I clearly need them."

They ate on the couch with the TV off, which was the whole plan and the entire extent of the plan. Around nine she leaned against his shoulder and said they should probably talk, sometime, about the lease renewal, and about the other thing, and he said sometime, yeah, and neither of them meant tonight, and both of them were fine with that.


Nora got home first, which was unusual. She stood in the entryway with her keys still in her hand, taking in the apartment as if she hadn't lived in it for three years — the crooked stack of library books, the plant on the windowsill that had somehow survived them both.

Four years. She'd almost let it slip past. It was Dev who'd texted at eleven that morning: *do we do something? do we want to do something?*

*Something small,* she'd written back. *Home.*

He came in at six-thirty with a paper bag and cold hands. "The good bread was gone," he said, kissing the side of her head. "I got the mediocre bread."

"I made the sauce."

"You made the sauce?"

"I made the sauce at two in the afternoon because I left work early and didn't tell you."

Dev put the bag down. "Nora."

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's a little bit of a thing."

They cooked around each other in the narrow kitchen, which they'd gotten good at — the half-step back, the reached-around arm, the wordless handing over of the wooden spoon. Dev put on the playlist he'd made her the first winter, the one with too many sad songs on it, and she didn't complain.

They ate at the table instead of the couch. He'd bought a bottle of wine that cost eighteen dollars, which for them counted as extravagance.

"Four years," he said. "Do you feel any different?"

She thought about it honestly, the way she thought about everything. "I feel like I know where you keep things."

Dev laughed. "That's romantic."

"It is, actually."

Later they did end up on the couch, the dishes soaking, her feet in his lap, the movie neither of them was really watching. Outside, a bus sighed at the corner. Neither of them said anything for a long while, and it was fine.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter, mentally rearranging the evening. Four years. They'd agreed on no gifts, no restaurant, nothing that required a reservation or a nice shirt.

She started the rice. Then she texted Micah: *do we have garlic or am I imagining that*

*Imagining. I'll grab some. Also I'm bringing the thing.*

*What thing.*

*The thing.*

He came in twenty minutes later with garlic, a bottle of the cheap Portuguese wine they'd gotten addicted to in the fall, and a manila envelope, which he set on the table facedown like a card player.

"That's the thing?"

"That's the thing. Later."

He took over the stove, because she'd salted the water and then forgotten and salted it again, and he had a talent for rescuing things. She sat on the counter with a glass of the wine and read him a work email she found insulting, and he made the right noises at the right moments.

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which was the whole extent of the ceremony. Afterward she made him hand over the envelope.

Inside were printouts. Photos of a duplex in Somerville, three bedrooms, a yard with a lilac in it, listed for rent starting in August.

Dana looked at them for a while.

"You said you wanted a yard," Micah said. "Once. In a parking lot. In 2021."

"You remembered a parking lot."

"I remember everything you say. It's a burden."

She spread the pages out and put her finger on the kitchen, which had a window over the sink. "There's no dishwasher."

"There's no dishwasher," he admitted.

"Okay," she said. "Let's go look at it."


Dana got home first, which was unusual. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the good cutting board out that morning as a kind of promise to herself.

Four years. Not a wedding anniversary, nothing anyone else would mark on a calendar, but she remembered the specific October Tuesday when Marcus had asked if she wanted to keep doing this—meaning the two of them, the whole arrangement—and she'd said yes before he finished the sentence.

He came in at six-forty with a paper bag under his arm and rain in his hair.

"You bought bread," she said. "I bought bread."

"Then we have two breads. This is a functional relationship." He set the bag down and kissed the side of her head, and she felt the cold of the outside still on his face.

They'd agreed on no restaurant. Restaurants meant waiting forty minutes at a bar with their coats in their laps, shouting over other people's birthdays. Instead Dana had thawed the short ribs, and Marcus had made a playlist on his phone that was ninety percent songs she'd complained about at some point.

"This is the one from Erica's wedding," she said.

"You danced to it."

"I was drunk at Erica's wedding."

"You were happy at Erica's wedding." He was chopping shallots badly, the way he always did, too thick, and she didn't correct him.

They ate at the small table by the window with the radiator clanking. Marcus told a long story about his boss's new standing desk. Dana laughed in the wrong places on purpose.

Later, on the couch, she put her feet in his lap and he held her ankle absently, thumb moving, watching the rain streak the glass.

"Same time next year," he said.

"Same everything," she said, and meant it.


Dana came home from her shift at the veterinary clinic smelling faintly of antiseptic and wet dog, which was how Marcus knew it had been a long one. He handed her a glass of the cheap prosecco they'd bought at the grocery store on Grand Avenue.

"Four years," he said.

"Four years." She kicked off her clogs by the door and left them at an angle that would irritate her later. "Did you get the peppers?"

"I got the peppers. I also got the wrong kind of rice, apparently, according to the internet."

"The internet doesn't live here."

They cooked together in the narrow galley kitchen of the apartment they'd shared for three of those four years, the one with the radiator that clanked like something trying to get out. Marcus chopped; Dana ran the stove, because Marcus had a habit of walking away from things that were browning. She told him about the beagle that had swallowed a sock. He told her that his brother had called about Thanksgiving again, and that he'd said they would think about it, which was not a lie so much as a delay.

They ate on the couch with plates on their knees because the table was covered in Dana's continuing-education binders. Afterward Marcus produced a small carrot cake from its hiding place behind the cleaning supplies, and Dana laughed at him for the hiding place, and then went quiet when she saw he'd written *4* on it in shaky blue frosting.

"You piped that," she said.

"With a sandwich bag."

She kissed him. Later they watched half of a movie neither of them was following, her feet in his lap, the radiator clanking, the city going about its business outside the window. Somewhere around eleven she said, "Same time next year," and he said, "Obviously," and neither of them made it to the end of the film.