Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter: the good cutting board, the garlic she'd bought at lunch, the bottle of wine she'd hidden behind the coats that morning so Marcus wouldn't see it and ruin his own surprise.

Four years. Not a wedding anniversary — the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when they'd walked around the reservoir for two hours because neither of them wanted to be the one to say the walk was over.

She was halfway through mincing when the door opened.

"You're chopping," Marcus said, accusatory, setting down a paper bag. "I said I'd cook."

"You said you'd *bring* something. That's different." She pointed the knife vaguely at the bag. "What is that?"

"Bread. The good kind, from the place on Fulton. And" — he pulled out a small waxed-paper package — "the cheese you like that costs an insane amount of money."

"That's the one that smells like a barn."

"You love the barn cheese."

"I do love the barn cheese." She wiped her hands and kissed him, and he tasted like the cold outside.

They cooked badly together, the way they always did, both of them wanting the stove at once. Marcus put on the playlist he'd been quietly adding to since September, and Dana pretended not to notice that every song was one she'd mentioned liking at some point in four years. They ate on the couch because the table had become a place where mail lived.

"I got you something," she said afterward, and produced a framed photo — the reservoir, taken last spring, no people in it at all.

Marcus looked at it a long time. "That's the bench," he said.

"That's the bench."

He set it on the shelf, adjusted it twice, and sat back down beside her.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana's plan to grill was finished before it began. She stood at the window of their apartment in Bloomington, watching water sheet off the awning of the laundromat across the street, and considered her options.

"We could order from that Thai place," Marcus said from the kitchen. He was already elbow-deep in the cabinet under the sink, hunting for the good candles they'd bought last Christmas and never used. "The one with the peanut curry you like."

"Four years and we celebrate with takeout."

"Four years and we celebrate however we want." He surfaced with two mismatched candlesticks and a lighter. "Also, I got something."

He'd hidden the bottle behind the flour, which was clever, because Dana didn't bake. It was the same cheap Malbec they'd shared on their third date, the night they'd walked back to her old place on Grant Street and she'd realized, somewhere between the parking garage and her front door, that she wasn't going to be able to keep him at arm's length.

"You remembered the label," she said.

"I took a picture of it. Back then. I don't know why."

Dana set the table while Marcus called in the order. She used the cloth napkins from her grandmother, which she'd been saving for an occasion that never seemed to arrive. The candles were too tall for the table and cast strange shadows on the ceiling.

They ate slowly. Marcus told the story about the parking garage wrong on purpose, insisting she'd kissed him first, and Dana corrected him the way she had every year, and the rain kept on. Around nine they moved to the couch and put on a movie neither of them watched.

"Same time next year," Marcus said.

"Somewhere with a real dining room."

"Deal," he said, and meant it.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen of their apartment holding a grocery bag, listening to the radiator tick, and decided against candles. Candles were for the restaurant they couldn't afford this month, after the car repair. Instead she put on the record Wes had bought her in Asheville, the one with the scratch in the third song, and started chopping garlic.

He came in at six-forty with his coat still buttoned and a paper sack under his arm. "You cooked," he said, sounding accused.

"You bought something."

"Cannoli. From the place by the office." He set them down and reached past her for the wine opener, which lived in the drawer with the batteries and rubber bands, a system neither of them defended. "Four years. Do we count from the party, or from the week after?"

"The party. You walked me to the bus and talked about your grandmother for twenty minutes."

"That's not romantic."

"It was extremely romantic. You were nervous." She handed him the wooden spoon. "Stir. Don't let it stick."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place for mail. Wes told her about the argument at work; Dana told him her sister had called again about Thanksgiving, and they agreed to decide later, which was what they always agreed. The pasta was slightly oversalted. Neither mentioned it.

Afterward he washed and she dried, hips bumping in the narrow galley. He said, "We should do something bigger next year. A trip."

"Sure," she said, and meant it the way people mean things they haven't budgeted for. Then she leaned against him, dish towel still in her hand, and stayed there while the record ended and the needle rode the empty groove, neither of them moving to lift it.


The Fourth of March

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 particular slant of late afternoon light across the kitchen counter, and thought: seven years.

She started the sauce. Not because she was better at it — Micah was better at it — but because she wanted him to walk in and smell garlic and know she'd remembered too.

He came in at six twenty with a paper bag under his arm and rain on his shoulders. "Don't look," he said.

"I'm looking."

"It's not wrapped."

"I don't care." She turned anyway, stirring, and let him get past her to the bedroom. She heard a drawer open, then close.

They ate at the small table by the window because the dining table had become a place where mail lived. Micah had brought home a bottle of the Rioja they'd shared at that restaurant in Providence, the one that had closed two years ago. He poured it and said, "It's not the same vintage."

"Nothing's the same vintage," Dana said.

He gave her a paperback — an out-of-print collection by the poet she'd written her thesis on, the one she'd complained for years about not being able to find. She held it a long moment before she opened the cover. He'd written nothing inside. She looked up.

"I thought you'd want it clean," he said.

"I do." Her voice caught, unexpectedly, on the second word.

She gave him a photograph she'd found while cleaning out the closet: the two of them on a friend's porch in 2018, both mid-laugh, both blurry. She'd had it framed in walnut.

Later they sat on the floor with the wine and the rain going and argued mildly about whether their anniversary was the fourth or the fifth of March. Neither of them changed their position. Neither of them minded.


Maya got home first, which almost never happened. The bus had skipped its usual crawl through downtown, and she found herself standing in the kitchen at 5:40 with an hour to spare and no idea what to do with it.

She started the rice. Then she pulled the good bowls down from the top shelf — the heavy ceramic ones Daniel's aunt had given them when they moved in together, which they'd used maybe four times in two years because they were a nightmare to wash.

Daniel came in at 6:15 carrying a paper bag against his chest like it might escape.

"You went to Lucia's," Maya said.

"I went to Lucia's." He set the bag down and produced a small box of cannoli, slightly crushed on one corner. "The guy behind the counter asked if it was a special occasion and I said kind of, and then I couldn't explain it, so I just said yes."

"Three years is a special occasion."

"Three years of what, though? That's the part I couldn't explain. Anniversary of a party where we mostly talked about your roommate's cat."

"You remembered the cat's name for six weeks."

"I wrote it down." He took off his jacket and started washing his hands. "What are we having?"

"Rice, and I was going to do the salmon, but I looked at it and it smelled like a low tide, so."

"So?"

"So eggs."

Daniel laughed and got the pan down. They cooked side by side without much coordination, bumping elbows, Maya salting things he'd already salted. They ate at the table instead of the couch. Halfway through, Daniel got up and turned off the overhead light, leaving just the one over the stove, and it was better that way.

Afterward Maya washed the heavy bowls by hand while Daniel dried, and they argued mildly about whether the cannoli should be split or claimed. They split them.


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 whether they'd agreed on cooking or ordering. Four years ago tonight they'd eaten pad thai out of the container on the floor of her old studio apartment, because she hadn't owned a table.

She texted Marcus: *are we making something or am I calling Thai Basil*

*Making something,* he wrote back. *I bought stuff yesterday. Don't look in the crisper.*

She looked in the crisper. Asparagus, a lemon, and a package of scallops that must have cost him forty dollars.

When he came in he was carrying a bottle of wine and a paper bag from the bakery on Fremont, and he caught her guilty expression immediately.

"You looked."

"I looked. I'm sorry. I have no self-control, you've known this about me for four years."

"Four years exactly," he said, setting everything down, and kissed her while still holding his keys.

She put on the playlist they'd built together over the years, a strange document that ran from Al Green to a Latvian folk group he'd become obsessed with in 2022. Marcus seared the scallops while she cut the woody ends off the asparagus and complained about her boss, who had scheduled a Saturday meeting.

"We could just not go," Marcus said. "We could get in the car and drive to the coast."

"Say that again in six hours and I might believe you."

They ate at the table she now owned. Halfway through, Dana got up and turned the overhead light off and lit the candle from the bathroom, the eucalyptus one, and it made the food smell faintly medicinal, and neither of them cared. Marcus told her the story of the first thing he'd ever thought about her, which she'd heard before, and which she asked for anyway.

Later there was a small cake, mostly frosting. They ate it standing up.


The invitation came in the form of a sticky note on the coffee maker: "Seven years. What are we doing?"

Marcus found it at six-fifteen, before Dana was awake. He wrote underneath it, "Something good," and stuck it back.

They'd been in the house on Halstead for four of those seven years, long enough that the mortgage felt more binding than a certificate ever would have. Dana's mother still asked. Marcus's mother had stopped, which he considered a kindness.

That evening, they sat on the back steps with beers, the neighbor's sprinkler ticking.

"We could do Bellamy's," Dana said. "The tasting menu thing."

"A hundred and forty a person."

"It's seven years."

"It's seven years," he agreed. "Which is why I was thinking we drive up to that lake."

She looked at him. "In October?"

"Cabin's cheap in October. Nobody's there. We could take the good coffee, bring the dog." He picked at the label on his bottle. "We didn't get a honeymoon, technically. We didn't get anything."

Dana didn't answer right away. A car went by with its window down, spilling music.

"I liked the first apartment," she said. "The one with the radiator that banged."

"You hated that radiator."

"I liked being broke with you. That's different." She leaned against his shoulder. "Okay. The lake. But we're eating well up there. I'm not doing hot dogs."

"I'll bring the cast iron."

"And we're taking pictures. Actual ones. My phone is full of the dog and receipts."

He said he'd handle the reservation. She said she'd handle the food, which meant she'd make a list Sunday and revise it four times before Thursday.

Later, brushing her teeth, Dana peeled the sticky note off the coffee maker and put it in the drawer with the takeout menus, where she kept things she wasn't ready to throw away.


The apartment smelled like burnt garlic, which was how most of their arguments started.

"Seven years," Dani said, scraping the pan into the trash. "We should do something."

Marcus looked up from the couch, where he'd been half-watching a documentary about deep-sea vents. "We are doing something. We're eating carbonized dinner together."

"I'm serious." She sat on the arm of the couch, and he shifted to make room. "Everyone keeps asking what our plans are. My mother asked."

"Your mother asks so she can find out if I'm proposing."

"I know."

He paused the documentary. The screen froze on a tube worm swaying in the dark. "Do you want me to?"

"No." She said it fast, then softer: "No. I want to go to the coast."

That surprised him. "Like Ocean City?"

"Like the Outer Banks. That rental with the crooked porch. Off-season, so it's cheap and empty and cold."

Marcus considered. Seven years ago they'd met at a wedding neither of them wanted to attend, and had spent the reception on a balcony trading complaints about the DJ. He remembered thinking she was the first person in months he hadn't wanted to escape.

"I have that deposition on the eighth," he said.

"Go the ninth, then. Come back Sunday."

"Three days."

"Three days is a lot for us."

He picked up his phone and started searching rentals, holding the screen where she could see. She leaned in, chin nearly on his shoulder, and pointed at a listing—gray shingles, a wraparound porch that did look slightly wrong.

"That one."

"It's four hundred more."

"We burned dinner," she said. "We're saving on groceries."

He laughed and booked it before he could argue himself out of it. Later, doing dishes, she flicked water at him, and he said, without turning around, "Seven years. Not bad."

"Not bad," she agreed.


The Tenth of May

Marisol found the calendar note first, though Derek had written it: *10 yrs — do something?*

"Ten years," she said, holding up the calendar. "You wrote a question mark."

Derek looked up from the sink, hands wet. "I wrote it in February. I've had four months to think and I've got nothing."

They'd lived in the same rented duplex in Sacramento for six of those years, long enough that the neighbors assumed they were married and neither of them bothered correcting anyone. Marisol's mother still asked. Derek's father had stopped.

"We could go to that place on 21st," Derek offered. "The one with the tasting menu."

"That's four hundred dollars to eat foam."

"It's not all foam."

She sat down at the kitchen table, which wobbled, which it had wobbled for three years. "What did we do the first year?"

"Nothing. We were broke. You made pasta and we watched that documentary about the shipwreck."

"The one you fell asleep during."

"I did not fall asleep. I rested my eyes for forty minutes."

Marisol laughed, and it turned into something quieter. "I want to go back to Point Reyes."

Derek dried his hands. They'd gone there the second summer, camped badly, gotten rained on, fought about the tent poles, and then watched fog roll over the cliffs at six in the morning while eating cold granola bars out of the box.

"With a real tent this time," he said.

"With a real tent. And I'm not doing granola bars."

"I'll bring the camp stove."

"You'll bring the camp stove and actually pack the fuel canister."

"That was one time."

She stood, took the pen off the counter, and crossed out the question mark. Then she wrote *Pt. Reyes* underneath in her small, precise handwriting, and Derek watched her do it, and neither of them said anything else about it, because there wasn't anything else that needed saying.


The lease renewal notice had come in the mail that morning, which was how Delia realized the date. Seven years since she'd hauled two duffel bags and a cactus up the stairs of the Ridgeway Street apartment.

"Do you want to do something?" she asked Marcus over dinner, tapping the envelope against the table. "For the anniversary."

He looked up from his rice. "Which one? We have too many."

This was fair. There was the day they met, at a friend's terrible barbecue where the grill never got hot. There was the first-date anniversary, which they'd stopped observing sometime around year three. But the move-in date had stuck, mostly because Delia's mother had called it a mistake at the time, and they'd both quietly decided to prove her wrong every October.

"Seven years of shared plumbing," Marcus said. "That's the big one."

They batted around ideas. He suggested the tasting menu place downtown that a coworker wouldn't shut up about. Delia made a face — a hundred and forty dollars a head to eat foam. She proposed a weekend upstate, but Marcus had a deposition Monday and hated driving in the rain, and October upstate was mostly rain.

What they landed on, after twenty minutes of negotiating, was smaller. They'd take Friday off. Drive out to the orchard where they'd gone that first fall, when neither of them had known if the living-together thing would work. Pick more apples than two people could reasonably eat. Come home, make a pie badly, watch the movie they always meant to rewatch.

"That's it?" Marcus said. "That's the seven-year plan?"

"You wanted foam."

He considered it. "No," he admitted. "I wanted the orchard. I just wanted you to say it first."

Delia put the lease notice on the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a lemon, and started a list: cinnamon, butter, flour, whatever else a bad pie required.


Marcus found the calendar page still turned to March, though it was the twelfth of April. He flipped it and there it was, circled in Priya's handwriting from months ago: *7 YEARS.*

"You saw," she said from the doorway, holding two mugs. She handed him the one with the chipped handle, the one she always gave him.

"I saw. What do you want to do?"

She sat on the counter, feet swinging, the way she had in every apartment they'd shared since the one above the laundromat in Somerville. "My mother asked if we were going to finally make it official."

"What'd you say?"

"I said we bought a water heater together in February and that felt pretty official."

He laughed. The water heater had been a whole ordeal—two weekends, a plumber named Dale, an argument about tankless versus traditional that neither of them won.

"I don't want a big thing," she said. "Last year we did the tasting menu and I was hungry after."

"You were hungry because you don't eat foam."

"Nobody should eat foam."

He leaned against the counter beside her. Outside, a neighbor's kid was failing to start a lawnmower, the engine coughing and dying. "What about the lake," he said. "Where we went that first fall. There's that place that does the fried perch."

She considered it. "We'd have to leave early. Traffic on the 94."

"We'd leave early."

"And come back Sunday. I have that call at eight Monday."

"We'd come back Sunday."

She looked at him over the rim of her mug for a long moment, and he knew she was doing the thing where she checked whether he actually wanted it or was just offering. He held still and let her look.

"Okay," she said. "The lake. But I'm picking the podcast."

"That's fine."

"It's the murder one."

"It's always the murder one," he said, and went to find the cooler.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—crumpled, faded to the color of weak tea, but still legible. Pho Hoa, two bowls, one Vietnamese coffee. April 14, five years ago.

"You kept this," Dev said when she showed him. He was standing at the counter cutting a bell pepper, and he set the knife down.

"I didn't keep it. It's been in the drawer with the takeout menus and the batteries."

"So you kept it."

They'd been talking around the anniversary for two weeks. Marisol had floated the idea of the coast, some place with a wraparound porch, and Dev had made a noise that meant he was calculating the drive. Then his sister's surgery got scheduled for the twelfth, and the coast quietly stopped being mentioned.

"We could just go back," he said now. "To Pho Hoa."

"It closed. It's a vape shop."

"It's not."

"Dev. We drove past it in February. You said, 'that's depressing.'"

He remembered. He picked the knife back up, then set it down again. "Okay. Then we cook something we're bad at."

Marisol leaned against the fridge. "Define bad."

"Something with a sauce that breaks. Something that takes four hours."

"Cassoulet," she said immediately, like she'd been holding it.

So that was the plan: Saturday, the fourteenth, beans soaking since Thursday, Dev on the phone with the butcher pretending he knew what he wanted. Marisol found a playlist from the year they met and refused to be embarrassed by it. The kitchen got too hot and they opened the window and the neighbor's dog barked at nothing for twenty minutes.

The cassoulet was mediocre. The bread was good. Around eleven they sat on the floor with the last of the wine, backs against the cabinets, and neither of them said anything for a while, and it was fine.


The Fifth of October

Priya found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from a taqueria in Sacramento, dated five years ago that Friday.

"You kept this?" She held it up when Marcus came in from the garage, wiping grease off his hands.

He squinted. "That was the night your car wouldn't start."

"And you drove forty minutes to jump it and then acted like you just happened to be nearby."

"I was nearby. Eventually." He pulled out a chair. "So. Anniversary."

They'd been circling it for two weeks, both waiting for the other to propose something. Marcus had assumed she'd want dinner somewhere with cloth napkins. Priya had assumed he'd want to avoid making a fuss, which he usually did, though she'd noticed he'd cleared his Friday calendar.

"I looked at that place on Twelfth," she said. "The prix fixe is one-forty a person."

Marcus made a face before he could stop himself.

"I know."

"We could do it," he said. "If you want it, we do it."

"I don't think I want it." She sat down across from him, still holding the receipt. "I think I want to drive to Sacramento."

He laughed. "To the taqueria."

"It's still open. I checked. Same building, new sign."

"That's four hours round trip."

"Five, with traffic." She waited.

Marcus thought about it. He thought about the highway, and the podcast they were behind on, and the way Priya always fell asleep somewhere past Vacaville and woke up embarrassed about it.

"We'd have to leave by two," he said.

"I already asked Denise to cover the afternoon."

"You already asked her." He shook his head, smiling. "You were going to talk me into this either way."

"I was going to ask nicely first."

He took the receipt from her, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. "Two o'clock," he said. "I'll fill up the tank."


They'd been arguing about the restaurant for three days, which was how Marisol knew the anniversary mattered more than either of them wanted to admit.

"Seven years isn't a real anniversary," Devon said, scrolling through his phone at the kitchen island. "Five, ten. Those are the ones people care about."

"Seven is when we moved in together." She was cutting the ends off green beans, not looking at him. "Seven is when I gave up my apartment with the good light."

"You hated that apartment."

"I loved that apartment. I hated the neighbors."

He set the phone down. Outside, the maple in the backyard had gone the color of rust, and the gutters needed cleaning again, a thing he'd been meaning to mention for a month.

"Okay," he said. "What do you want to do?"

"That's the problem. I don't want to go to Piccolo's and pretend the tasting menu is romantic. I want—" She stopped, embarrassed by the size of the feeling.

"Say it."

"I want to do the thing we did that first year. The drive up 9G with the terrible thermos coffee."

Devon laughed. "You said you'd never do that again. You said your back would never recover."

"My back never did recover."

He came around the island and took the knife out of her hand, set it on the cutting board. "Saturday," he said. "I'll get the thermos. You get the maps, since you don't trust my phone."

"Your phone lost us in Rhinebeck."

"My phone found us in Rhinebeck. Eventually."

She let him hold her there for a minute, the green beans half-finished, the light going amber through the window over the sink. Seven years. It wasn't a milestone anyone printed on a card.

"We should get the gutters done first," she said into his shoulder.

"I was thinking the same thing."


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out her coat pocket—a faded slip from Gino's, dated seven years ago exactly. She brought it to the kitchen, where Theo was standing over a pot of rice he'd started too early.

"Look what survived," she said.

He squinted at it. "Twelve dollars. We split a calzone."

"You insisted on paying and then apologized four times for the restaurant."

"It had those plastic tablecloths." He turned the receipt over, as if there might be something on the back. "Seven years."

They'd talked about doing something big. Marisol's sister kept sending links to a hotel in Sonoma with a hot tub on the balcony. Theo had a browser tab open, unread for two weeks, about a train that ran up the coast.

"We could go back," Marisol said. "To Gino's."

"It closed. It's a vape shop now."

"Right." She sat down at the table, still in her work clothes, and pulled her hair out of its clip. "Then what?"

Theo turned the burner down. He'd been thinking about it more than he'd admitted—had, in fact, considered a ring, and then considered how Marisol had said, twice, unprompted, that she didn't want one, and had believed her, mostly.

"There's that place on Alder with the patio," he said. "We could walk. Get the corner table if it's not taken."

"That's a Tuesday-night dinner."

"It's a good Tuesday-night dinner."

She looked at him. Outside, a neighbor's dog started up. "Okay," she said. "But we dress up. Real shoes. And you have to tell me the story about the calzone again, the long version, with the part about your uncle."

"That story isn't about the calzone."

"I know," Marisol said. "That's why I like it."

Theo covered the rice and set it aside for tomorrow. They took the long way, down past the school, arguing amiably about whether it had been raining that first night.


Marguerite found the receipt while looking for stamps—a crumpled slip from the Thai place on Cortland, dated three years ago to the day. She smoothed it flat on the kitchen counter and waited.

Desmond came in from the garage still wearing his work gloves, saw her face, and stopped.

"You kept it," she said.

"I keep everything. There's a shoebox."

She hadn't known about the shoebox. He went and got it: movie stubs, a parking pass from the weekend in Sonoma, the tag from a sweater she'd returned. Nothing organized. Just accumulated.

"So," he said. "Friday."

"Friday." Three years since that first dinner, when she'd talked too much about her dissertation and he'd asked follow-up questions like he meant them.

They discussed it over the next few days in fragments, the way they discussed everything—between loads of laundry, during commercials. Desmond wanted to go back to the Thai place. Marguerite pointed out it had changed owners and now served fusion tacos.

"We could cook," she said. "That salmon thing."

"The salmon thing takes four hours."

"We have four hours."

What they settled on wasn't dramatic. They'd cook the salmon thing. They'd open the wine his brother had sent at Christmas, the one they kept meaning to open. Marguerite would print a photo from the Sonoma weekend—an actual print, from an actual photo store—and they'd finally put something on the wall above the couch, which had been empty since they moved in.

"That's it?" Desmond said. "No grand gesture?"

"Do you want a grand gesture?"

He considered. "No. I want the salmon thing."

Friday, the kitchen filled with steam and the smell of ginger. She burned the first batch of rice. He opened the wine early. Around ten they hung the photo, slightly crooked, and stood back to look at it, and neither of them moved to straighten it.


Marcus found the takeout menus scattered across the kitchen counter where Devon had left them, each one marked with a wobbly star in blue pen.

"Five years," Devon said, coming in from the garage with paint-flecked hands. "I thought maybe we'd do something. Actual plates. Cloth napkins, even."

"We own cloth napkins?"

"We own two. Your mother gave them to us."

Marcus laughed and pushed the menus aside. He'd been thinking about the anniversary for weeks, ever since the calendar notification had popped up on his phone in the middle of a budget meeting. Five years since Devon had shown up at his apartment in Sacramento with a car full of records and a rescue dog with three legs. The dog was gone now, buried under the lemon tree out back, but the records were still stacked along the living room wall, alphabetized by an argument they'd had in year two.

"I was thinking about the coast," Marcus said. "Bodega Bay, maybe. There's that place with the oysters."

Devon leaned against the doorframe. "Two hours each way. We'd be exhausted."

"That's the whole point of a Saturday."

They went back and forth while Devon washed his hands, the water running long past clean. Eventually they landed somewhere in the middle: dinner at the Portuguese place downtown, the one with the tile floor and the waiter who always remembered Devon's name and never Marcus's. Then home, because home was the thing they'd built.

"I got you something," Devon said. "But it's not wrapped and it's not a surprise. It's a new lamp for your desk."

"The good one?"

"The one you've been sending me links about since March."

Marcus kissed him on the temple, and they stood there in the kitchen a moment longer, the menus still fanned out behind them like a hand of cards nobody was going to play.


Nine years to the day since they'd met at a mutual friend's cookout, and Priya still couldn't decide what to do about it.

"We could just order from Nonna's," Marcus said, leaning against the kitchen doorframe with a dish towel over his shoulder. "The eggplant thing you like."

"That's what we did last year."

"Because it's good."

She pulled her hair up off her neck, thinking. Their apartment in Providence was small and full of things they'd accumulated together—the ugly lamp from the estate sale, the wobbly bookshelf Marcus had built badly and refused to let her fix. Nine years of accumulation. It felt like it should be marked somehow.

"My sister keeps asking if we're going to do something," she said.

"Your sister asks that about every Tuesday."

"She's not wrong that we could try harder."

Marcus came into the kitchen properly, tossed the towel on the counter. "Okay. What do you actually want to do?"

Priya considered it. What she wanted, she realized, was not a restaurant. "Remember that beach in Narragansett? The one with the terrible parking?"

"Where I got stung by a jellyfish."

"You got stung by seaweed. There was no jellyfish."

"There was a jellyfish."

"We could go Saturday. Bring sandwiches. It'll be cold."

He smiled at that, the slow one that still got her. "It'll be freezing. Nobody'll be there."

"That's the appeal."

So Saturday they drove down with a thermos of coffee and two turkey sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and the beach was empty and gray and the wind came off the water hard enough to make their eyes stream. They walked to the jetty and back. Marcus put his hand in her coat pocket where hers already was.

"Nine years," he said.

"Nine years."

Neither of them said anything about ten. There was time. They ate the sandwiches in the car with the heater running, and it was enough.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—crumpled, faded, from a diner in Bakersfield that had since closed. Two coffees, one order of hash browns. Seven years ago that week.

"Look what I found," she said, holding it up when Dev came in from the garage, sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted, then laughed. "You kept that?"

"I keep everything. You know this about me."

They'd been in the house on Larkin Street for four of those seven years, which meant they'd spent more time under this roof than either of them had spent anywhere since childhood. Dev leaned against the counter and turned the receipt over. Someone—him, he was fairly sure—had written *ask her about the dog* on the back.

"Chester," he said.

"You remembered his name for six months after that. I was very impressed."

The question of what to do about the anniversary had been circling for a week. Marisol's sister kept sending links to restaurants with tasting menus. Dev had looked at flights to Santa Fe and then closed the tab, thinking about the water heater making its noise again.

"We could just go to a diner," he said.

"That feels lazy."

"It feels accurate."

She considered this. Outside, the neighbor's sprinkler ticked on. "There's that place off the highway. The one with the pie case."

"That's the one I was thinking of."

So on Saturday they drove forty minutes east and sat in a vinyl booth under a ceiling fan that wobbled, and Marisol ordered hash browns she didn't especially want, and Dev asked her about the dog she'd had as a kid, a beagle named Poppy, and she told him a story he'd somehow never heard.

They got pie to go. He kept the second receipt.


The Tenth of March

Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from a taqueria on Mission Street, dated March 10, six years ago. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"Dev," she called toward the bedroom. "Do you remember what we ate on our first date?"

He appeared in the doorway, holding a sock he'd been searching for. "You had the al pastor. I had the carnitas and then regretted it, because yours was better."

"You stole half of it."

"I paid for dinner. That was the tax."

She held up the receipt. He came closer, squinted, and laughed—a short, surprised sound. "Twenty-two dollars. God."

They stood in the small kitchen of the apartment they'd shared for four years now, the one with the radiator that clanked and the window that looked out at a brick wall and, if you leaned, a wedge of sky.

"So what do we do this year?" she asked. "Six isn't a round number."

"Every number is round if you're bad at math."

She flicked the receipt at him. He caught it.

They'd done the fancy dinner two years ago and spent the whole meal comparing it unfavorably to their kitchen table. Last year they'd tried a weekend in Mendocino and it had rained the entire time, which they now agreed had been perfect.

"We could just go back," Dev said. "To the taqueria."

"It closed. Became a poke place, then a vape shop."

"Then we recreate it. Al pastor, carnitas, the terrible margaritas."

Marisol considered. "I'd want to make the tortillas."

"That's not a recreation, that's an improvement."

"Fine. An improvement." She was already writing a list on the back of an envelope: masa, pineapple, limes. "You have to steal half my food."

"Obviously," Dev said, and went back to looking for his sock.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a movie neither of them had watched, seven years ago, because they'd spent the whole hundred and ten minutes talking in the back row until an usher asked them to leave.

"Look at this," he said, holding them up.

Priya was at the kitchen table with her laptop, half-finished spreadsheet glowing. She squinted, then laughed. "The Bergman thing. You picked that to seem sophisticated."

"It worked."

"It absolutely did not work. I liked you because you got us kicked out."

The anniversary was Saturday. They'd been circling it all week without landing anywhere. Priya's sister had suggested the winery up north; Marcus's coworker kept pushing a restaurant with a three-month waitlist he apparently had connections to. Neither idea had stuck.

"What if we don't do anything big," Priya said. She closed the laptop. "I've been in meetings for nine days straight. I want to be in this house."

Marcus leaned against the counter. "I could cook."

"You could cook badly, and I'd help, and we'd end up ordering something anyway."

"That's the tradition, though."

They landed on it slowly, the way they landed on most things—her thinking out loud, him adding pieces. They'd make the pasta from the recipe his mother had mailed them on an index card. They'd put the ticket stubs in the frame Priya had bought last year and never filled. And they'd watch the Bergman movie, actually watch it, all the way through, and see if it held up.

"And if it's terrible?" Marcus asked.

"Then we talk through it," she said. "Nobody can kick us out."

On Saturday the sauce scorched a little on the bottom. They ate it anyway, on the couch, the frame propped on the shelf behind them, and made it forty minutes into the film before they stopped watching.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that terrible open mic, and Priya had spent the week dropping hints she thought were subtle.

"So," she said, leaning against the kitchen doorframe on Thursday night while Marcus scrubbed a pan. "Saturday."

"Saturday," he agreed.

"I was thinking we could go back to Delaney's."

Marcus set the pan in the drying rack. "Delaney's closed. Two years ago. It's a vape shop now."

"I know." She hopped up onto the counter, the way she'd been doing since they moved in together in 2019, the way that had put a permanent scuff mark on the cabinet below. "But we could stand outside it. Look at it. Feel old."

He laughed, drying his hands. "That's your big plan for ten years?"

"I don't have a big plan. That's the problem." She pulled her knees up. "Everyone keeps asking what we're doing and I keep saying 'something nice' and their faces do this thing."

"What thing?"

"Like they're waiting for me to say you're proposing."

Marcus considered this. He leaned against the counter beside her, close enough that their arms touched. "Are you waiting for that?"

"No," she said, and meant it, mostly. "I'm waiting for something that feels like ten years and not like a Tuesday."

They stood there for a while. The dishwasher clicked over into its dry cycle.

"What if we cooked," Marcus said. "The whole thing. That mole recipe you keep saying takes six hours."

"It does take six hours."

"So we take six hours." He shrugged. "We put on records. We drink the good tequila your brother left. And then at some point we go stand outside the vape shop and feel old."

Priya looked at him. "That's actually perfect."

"I have my moments."

"About one a decade," she said, and kissed the side of his head.


The rain had been falling since Thursday, which was how they ended up on the living room floor with a legal pad between them, arguing amiably about what counted as the beginning.

"The first date was the coffee thing," Dana said. "March ninth."

"That wasn't a date. You brought your sister."

"She had a flat tire. That doesn't make it not a date."

Wes took the pen from her and drew a line down the middle of the page. On his side he wrote *April 2 — the night you fell asleep on my couch and didn't leave for nine days.* On hers she wrote *March 9* and underlined it twice, hard enough to tear the paper.

Ten years. That was the part neither of them disputed. Ten years of one lease after another, of her mother's casseroles at Christmas, of the dog they'd adopted in 2019 who now snored against the radiator with his legs in the air.

"We could go somewhere," Wes said. "Asheville. Or that place in Door County your coworker won't shut up about."

"In April? It'll be forty degrees and everything will be closed."

"You hate everything I suggest."

"I hate that you suggest things you don't want to do." She rolled onto her back and looked at the water stain on the ceiling, the one shaped vaguely like Ohio. "You want to stay home. Just say it."

He considered lying and then didn't. "I want to make the short ribs. The ones that take six hours. And I want to eat them at the actual table, not on the couch."

"With the good plates."

"We have good plates?"

"My grandmother's. They're in the hall closet behind the vacuum."

Dana got up to find them, and Wes wrote *April 2* on her side of the page while she was gone, and she pretended not to notice when she came back.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a friend's barbecue in Sacramento, and Nadia was standing in the kitchen with a legal pad, writing down options.

"Okay," she said. "Option one: that Italian place on Fourteenth. Option two: we drive up to the coast. Option three—"

"You made a list." Theo came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag. He'd been trying to fix the lawnmower for three weekends running.

"I made a list because last year we said we'd figure it out and then we ate frozen pizza and watched a documentary about eels."

"That was a good documentary."

She looked at him over her glasses. He held up his hands in surrender and pulled out a chair.

They went through it. The coast meant traffic and a hotel they couldn't really justify, not with the water heater making that sound. The Italian place was fine but it was where they went for birthdays and job promotions, and this felt like it should be different.

"What about the barbecue?" Theo said.

"Whose barbecue?"

"Ours. We do one. Invite Priya, since it was her party. Invite whoever." He shrugged. "It's June. It's the same month."

Nadia set down her pen. "That's actually not stupid."

"I have moments."

So they did that. They spent the Saturday cleaning the yard, arguing mildly about whether the string lights were tangled because of him or because of the way she'd packed them. Priya came, and Priya's husband, and four other people, and Theo burned the first round of corn.

Late, after everyone left, they sat on the back steps with the last two beers. Nadia leaned against his shoulder.

"Ten years," she said.

"You want to do this again next year?"

"The barbecue?"

"Sure," he said. "That too."


Marisol found the receipt in a coat pocket, folded into eighths: a diner in Vermillion, South Dakota, dated exactly seven years ago. Two coffees, one slice of pie. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"You saved this," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted. "That was the night the alternator died."

"That was the night you told me you'd rather be stranded with me than anywhere else with anyone else."

"I was cold and delirious." He took the receipt, turned it over. "Seven years Thursday."

They'd been debating for a week. Desmond wanted to do something. Marisol had suggested nothing at all — a Thursday like any Thursday, because that was the whole point, wasn't it, that they'd built something ordinary enough to survive.

"Rachel keeps asking if we're going to make it official," he said, setting the receipt on the counter, aligning its edges with the tile grout the way he did.

"What'd you say?"

"I said we made it official in a Honda Civic outside a Casey's General Store."

Marisol laughed. She leaned against the fridge. "What if we drove back?"

"To South Dakota?"

"It's nine hours. We could leave Wednesday after your shift. Get pie. Come back Friday."

Desmond considered it. He was a man who considered things — a habit that had exhausted her at twenty-six and steadied her at thirty-three. "The Fergusons need the deck done by the fifteenth."

"So we come back Friday."

He picked up the receipt again, thumbed the softened crease. Outside, their neighbor's sprinkler ticked across the lawn.

"There's a motel there," he said finally. "Nothing special. Green sign."

"I remember the green sign."

"Then yeah." He looked up. "Let's go get pie."

She wrote it on the calendar in pen — *Vermillion* — and left the receipt propped against the sugar bowl, where they'd both keep seeing it.


The rain had been coming down since Thursday, which meant the hiking trail was out.

"We could just stay in," Marcus said, scrolling through his phone at the kitchen table. Seven years. Seven years since they'd met at his cousin's terrible backyard barbecue, where the burgers were charcoal and Priya had spent twenty minutes explaining to him why the potato salad was a public health hazard.

"We stayed in last year." Priya set down her mug. "And the year before, because of your work thing."

"That wasn't my fault. The server migration—"

"I'm not litigating the server migration."

He laughed. Outside, water sheeted down the window over the sink, the one they still hadn't fixed the seal on. Three years in this house and the list of things they hadn't fixed had grown its own gravity.

"What about that place on Delaware?" she said. "The Portuguese one. We keep saying."

"On a Saturday? We'd need a reservation."

"So call."

He looked at her over the phone. "You call. You're better at the voice."

"I have one voice."

"You have a phone voice. It's terrifying and effective."

She took the phone, and he watched her negotiate a table for 8:15, which was later than either of them liked to eat, and then hang up looking mildly triumphant.

"Eight fifteen," she said.

"That's practically midnight."

"You'll survive." She stood, refilled her coffee, and paused behind his chair, one hand flat between his shoulder blades. "Seven years."

"Seven years." He reached back and caught her wrist, held it a second. "Your cousin still owes me for that potato salad."

"Your cousin."

"Somebody's cousin."

She kissed the top of his head and went to find something to wear that wasn't jeans, and he sat listening to the rain and thinking that eight fifteen wasn't so late, really.


Marisol found the reservation confirmation still sitting in her drafts folder Tuesday morning, unsent. Ten years. She'd meant to book the tasting menu place downtown, the one with the wine pairings and the waiter who explained each course like a story.

"You never sent it," Dev said that evening, reading over her shoulder while stirring rice. He'd come home smelling like the print shop, ink under his fingernails.

"I kept thinking it wasn't right."

He turned down the burner. "It's not, is it."

They'd met at a wedding neither wanted to attend, standing by the coat check debating whether the DJ would play anything from before 2005. Ten years later they had a house in Bloomington with a mortgage they split unevenly, depending on the year, and a cat that only liked Dev.

"What if we drove out to the quarry," she said.

"In October?"

"Not to swim. Just to sit."

Dev considered this. The quarry was where they'd gone the first summer, before either of them said anything serious out loud, when the whole thing still felt like something they could walk away from.

"We'd need blankets," he said. "And that thermos, if I can find it."

They went Saturday. The water was steel-colored and the limestone ledges were cold enough that Marisol sat on her hands. Dev had made coffee with too much cinnamon, the way she'd liked it in her twenties and hadn't corrected him about since.

"Did you ever think we'd get married?" she asked.

"Sometimes. Do you want to?"

"I don't know. Ask me in another ten."

He laughed and pulled the blanket over both their knees. Below them, someone's dog was barking at the water. They stayed until the light went orange over the far ridge, then drove home and ate leftovers standing up in the kitchen, still wearing their coats.


The rain had been falling since Tuesday, which was how Dani ended up on the living room floor with a shoebox of receipts and ticket stubs instead of at the farmers market.

"Found it," she said, holding up a coaster from the Blue Owl, water-stained and creased down the middle. "Ten years next Saturday."

Marcus looked up from the stove, where he was doing something ambitious with lentils. "You kept that?"

"I kept everything. It's a sickness." She set it on the coffee table like an artifact. "So what do we do? Ten is a big one."

"My mother would say we should get married."

"Your mother says that on Tuesdays." Dani stretched her legs out under the table. "I mean it, though. Dinner somewhere? We could drive up to that place in Hudson."

Marcus turned the burner down. He had a way of thinking with his whole body, a stillness that used to make her nervous when they were younger and she mistook it for disapproval. "Honestly? I don't want to spend two hours in the car and then eat a forty-dollar piece of fish next to a table of people celebrating something else."

"Okay. So."

"So what if we just — did the whole day. Slowly. Get the good bread. Walk the loop at Fort Greene if it stops raining. Cook something here." He gestured vaguely at the kitchen. "You could put on that record you play when you think I'm asleep."

"I don't play anything when—"

"Roberta Flack. Every time."

Dani laughed and didn't argue. Outside, a car went by with its wipers going, and the sound of it filled the room for a second.

"We should invite Priya and Tom for dessert," she said. "Not dinner. Dessert."

"Dessert only. That's very civilized."

"We're ten years civilized."

He handed her a spoon to taste. She said it needed salt. He said it always needed salt, according to her, and added some anyway.


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out her coat pocket — a faded slip from Gino's Pizzeria, dated October 14th, five years ago. She brought it to the kitchen table where Deon was drinking coffee and reading something on his phone.

"Look what survived," she said.

He took it, squinted. "Twenty-two dollars for a large pepperoni and two beers. Highway robbery."

"That was our first date."

"That was our first date," he agreed. He set the phone down. "So what do we want to do? Five years feels like it deserves something."

They had this conversation every year, and every year it went differently. The first anniversary they'd gone to a wine bar and spent the whole night talking about how strange it was to celebrate a not-quite-holiday. The third they'd been broke and made pasta and watched three episodes of a nature documentary.

"I keep thinking we should do something big," Marisol said. "Like a trip. Charleston or something."

"We could." Deon turned the receipt over in his hands. "Or."

"Or?"

"Gino's is still there. It's not even good pizza, honestly. But it's still there."

She laughed. "That's so cheap of you."

"It's sentimental. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"There's a small difference."

They compromised, eventually, the way they usually did — dinner at Gino's on the actual night, sitting in the same corner booth if it was free, and then a weekend in Charleston in November when flights got cheaper. Marisol wrote both in the shared calendar on the refrigerator. Deon taped the receipt to the door beneath it, using the same roll of masking tape they'd used to label boxes when they moved in together.

"Five years," she said, looking at it.

"Five years." He kissed the top of her head on his way to the sink. "Still no idea what we're doing."

"Neither do I."

"Good," he said. "That's working out fine."


Marisol found the receipt in a jacket pocket while doing laundry—a diner on Route 9, dated seven years ago that Saturday. She smoothed it flat on the kitchen counter and left it there like bait.

Dev noticed it that evening while reheating soup. "You kept this?"

"It was in your coat. You kept it."

He picked it up, squinting at the faded numbers. "Two coffees and a plate of fries. I remember you said you weren't hungry and then ate most of them."

"That's revisionist."

"That's documentary."

They stood there a moment in the small kitchen of the house they'd rented for four years and bought last spring, the mortgage in both their names, which had felt, at the closing table, like a bigger commitment than any ring. Marisol's mother still asked. Dev's father had stopped asking, which was its own kind of statement.

"So what do we do?" Dev said. "Seven years."

"Something." She leaned against the counter. "Not a fancy restaurant. I don't want to sit across from you being formal."

"We could go back to the diner."

"It closed. It's a vape shop now."

Dev laughed, then stopped laughing. "That's actually sad."

They ended up deciding on a Saturday drive with no destination, which was how the original date had happened anyway—two people with nothing planned, killing an afternoon. Marisol packed sandwiches. Dev made a playlist that was ninety percent songs Marisol hated, which was the joke.

They drove north through towns neither could name afterward. Somewhere past Kingston they pulled over at a reservoir and ate on the hood of the car, cold and bright, jackets zipped to the chin.

"Seven years," Marisol said again, testing it.

Dev bumped his shoulder into hers. "You want to do seven more?"

She considered the water, the gray sky, the sandwich in her hands.

"Yeah," she said. "I think I do."


Marguerite found the sticky note on the coffee pot at six-fifteen, in Dev's cramped handwriting: *Seven years. What do we want to do?*

She wrote underneath it, *Something that isn't a restaurant,* and left it for him.

They'd met the year Dev was finishing his residency and Marguerite was selling her father's house in Toledo, which meant their anniversary always landed in the strange gray stretch of late February when Cleveland had run out of ideas. Seven years of that. Two apartments, one rented duplex, and now this house on Rosewood with the radiator that clanked like someone was trapped inside it.

He called her at lunch. "Not a restaurant. Okay. The place with the pottery? Where you paint the mug and they fire it?"

"We did that for year four."

"Did we?"

"You painted a raccoon. It's in the cabinet. You drink out of it."

"Huh." A pause; she could hear him walking, badge clipped, shoes on tile. "What if we didn't do anything."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I take Friday off. We stay home. I make the thing with the short ribs, which takes four hours, so you'd have to entertain yourself. You could work on the quilt."

Marguerite considered this. There was something in her that resisted—an old voice that said an anniversary ought to be *marked*, publicly, with a reservation and shoes that hurt. But that voice had been her mother's, and her mother had been married three times.

"I want a cake," she said. "A real one, from Corbo's. Not a whole one. A slice each."

"Cassata."

"Obviously cassata."

Friday he burned the first batch of shallots and started over. She sat at the kitchen table with the quilt across her knees, hand-stitching a border in the failing light, and didn't offer to help. At nine they ate on the couch with the plates on their laps, and the radiator clanked, and neither of them mentioned marriage, because neither of them was thinking about it.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from the Alamo Drafthouse, dated five years ago that Saturday.

"Devon," she called toward the bedroom. "Do you know what these are?"

He came out with a toothbrush in his mouth, squinted, then made a sound of recognition. He spat into the kitchen sink, which she hated, and she let it go.

"That terrible sci-fi movie," he said. "The one with the sentient fog."

"You fell asleep."

"I did not."

"You snored through the third act."

Five years. Neither of them had brought it up, though she'd been aware of the date circling closer, and she suspected he had too. They rented a place in Sacramento with a lemon tree that dropped fruit nobody used. His mother still asked, at holidays, whether there was news. There wasn't. They'd talked about it twice, both times inconclusively, both times without hurt feelings, which Marisol took as its own kind of answer.

"We should do something," Devon said. "Nice dinner? That Basque place?"

She considered it. Ninety dollars a head, a reservation they'd have to make weeks out, and they'd both be tired by nine.

"What if we did the movie again," she said. "Same theater. Whatever's playing."

He leaned against the counter. "That's genuinely lazy."

"It's thematic."

"It's lazy and thematic."

But he was already looking it up on his phone, and by Saturday they had two seats for a documentary about competitive sheepdogs, which was the only thing showing at the right time. They ordered the same pretzel appetizer. Devon stayed awake, mostly, and afterward they walked four blocks to the car in a light rain, arguing about whether the border collie from Wales had been robbed.

At a stoplight, he took her hand. Neither of them said anything about it, which was, she thought, exactly right.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries — a faded slip from Delmonico's Diner, dated seven years ago that Friday. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"Ten years," Theo said when she showed him, squinting at the date. "Wait. No. Seven since the diner. Ten since the wedding where you spilled wine on my shoes."

"Eight since the wedding. You always round up."

They were standing in the kitchen of the house they'd bought together in 2019, the one with the sunroom that leaked and the garden Theo had over-planted with tomatoes. Neither of them had ever proposed. It had come up twice, briefly, and both times dissolved into a shrug that felt more like agreement than avoidance.

"We could go back," Theo said. "To the diner."

"It closed. It's a vape shop now."

He laughed. "Okay. Then what?"

Marisol thought about it while she made coffee. She wanted something that felt like an occasion but not a performance. Last year they'd gone to a restaurant with tasting menus and small plates and had spent the whole drive home talking about how hungry they still were.

"What if we cooked the thing you made the first time you cooked for me?"

"The disaster chicken?"

"You've gotten better."

They settled on that: Saturday, the chicken, and the bottle of Rioja they'd been saving since a trip to Spain that had involved two missed trains and a very good afternoon in a park in Logroño. Theo suggested inviting her sister. Marisol vetoed it, then reconsidered, then vetoed it again.

Saturday came. The chicken was overcooked but edible. They ate in the sunroom with the space heater on, listening to rain hit the bad section of roof.

"Seven years," Theo said, raising his glass.

"Eight."

"Fine. Eight."

She clinked her glass against his and let him have the last word.


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated four years ago to the day. She'd bought a doorstop and a set of drawer liners for the apartment they'd just moved into on Fillmore Street, back when the radiator clanked all night and neither of them had a proper bed frame.

"Ben," she called from the kitchen. "Look what I found."

He came in still holding his coffee, squinting at the paper. Then he laughed. "The doorstop. God, that thing was terrible. It never held anything."

"We're due," she said. "Four years Saturday."

They'd never been good at anniversaries. Their first year, Ben had made reservations at a place downtown and she'd shown up straight from a double shift, exhausted, and they'd both agreed halfway through the appetizer that they'd rather be home. Since then, it had mostly been takeout and whatever movie was on.

"Bianchi's?" he offered.

Marisol considered it. "What if we didn't go out?"

"Not do anything?"

"No — do something. But here." She gestured vaguely at the living room, at the ficus in the corner that had somehow survived three moves. "I want to make my mom's pernil. The whole thing, six hours in the oven. And you could do that stupid playlist you're always threatening me with."

Ben set his mug down. "It's not stupid. It's chronological."

"It's forty minutes of songs from 2019."

"Forty-five now."

She smiled. "Fine. Forty-five."

So Saturday they cooked. Ben chopped garlic badly and Marisol corrected him without much conviction, and the apartment filled with the smell of oregano and pork fat. The playlist ran twice through. They ate at the coffee table because the dining chairs were still in the hallway from painting.

Later, Ben taped the receipt to the refrigerator. It stayed there.


When Marisol got home from her shift at the clinic, Deshawn had already spread the takeout menus across the kitchen table like a hand of cards.

"Ten years," he said. "Ten years is a big one. I think we should do something."

She kicked off her shoes and sat down across from him. The apartment smelled like the lemon cleaner he used when he was nervous about something.

"We could do the place on Beacon," she said. "The one with the patio."

"We could." He tapped a menu against the table. "Or we could not spend two hundred dollars to sit next to a table of finance guys talking about their boats."

Marisol laughed. That was the thing about ten years — she'd known exactly which restaurant he meant, and exactly how he felt about it.

"What do you actually want to do?" she asked.

He was quiet for a second. "I want to make that ridiculous lasagna. The one from your mom's recipe card that takes four hours. And I want to put on the playlist from the road trip. And I don't want to look at my phone."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Maybe we walk down to the water after."

She thought about the first apartment, the one with the radiator that clanked, where they'd eaten that same lasagna off plates they'd bought at a thrift store. Ten years of that, more or less. Different plates now.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm making the salad, because yours are terrible."

"My salads are minimalist."

"Your salads are lettuce."

He grinned and started clearing the menus. Marisol went to change out of her scrubs, and from the bedroom she could hear him already pulling pans out of the cabinet, humming something off-key, four days early.


The rain had started around four, which ruled out the walk they'd planned along the river.

"We could still go," Marisol said, standing at the window of their apartment in Providence. "We have that giant umbrella."

Dev looked up from the couch, where he'd been half-reading a magazine. "The one with the broken rib? We'd get soaked."

Seven years. It seemed like a number that should mean something more than it did, or maybe less. They'd moved in together after eighteen months, and the anniversary they celebrated was still the first date—dinner at a Thai place on Wickenden that had since become a nail salon.

"What if we just cooked?" Dev said. "I could do the thing with the short ribs."

"That takes four hours."

"I could start now. We eat at nine. It's not like we have anywhere to be tomorrow."

Marisol considered this. Her sister had asked, over Thanksgiving, whether they were ever going to "make it official," and Marisol had said something noncommittal that she'd been chewing on ever since. Not because she wanted a ring, particularly. More because the question had made their arrangement sound provisional, when it felt like the least provisional thing in her life.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm picking the wine, and it's going to be expensive."

"Deal."

He got up and went to the kitchen, and she heard the fridge open, the clatter of the Dutch oven. She stayed at the window a while longer, watching the rain sheet down over the parked cars.

Later, after the ribs, after the second bottle, they ended up on the floor with their backs against the couch, arguing amiably about whether they'd actually liked that Thai place or had just been young.

"It was mediocre," Dev said.

"It was perfect," Marisol said, and leaned her head on his shoulder.


Marisol found the receipt in a jacket pocket while doing laundry—a diner in Bakersfield, seven years old, faded to almost nothing. She brought it into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt edges off a grilled cheese.

"Look what survived."

He squinted at it. "That's the place with the pie case. You ordered coffee and didn't drink it."

"I was nervous."

"You were nervous?" He set down the spatula. "I changed shirts four times."

The anniversary was Thursday. They'd been circling the question for a week, neither wanting to be the one who cared too much about it. Seven years in the same apartment, three of those in this one, with the radiator that clanked and the neighbor who played trumpet badly on Sundays.

"We could do Antonelli's," Dev offered. "Get the corner table."

Marisol turned the receipt over. "Or we could drive to Bakersfield."

"That's five hours."

"Four and a half. We'd get there for dinner."

He looked at her the way he had when she'd suggested adopting a second cat, and then again when she'd suggested painting the bedroom green—the look that meant he was already agreeing and just needed a minute to be practical about it.

"The pie case is probably gone," he said.

"Probably."

"The whole diner is probably a vape shop."

"Almost certainly."

He picked up the sandwich, considered it, threw it in the trash. "I'll take Friday off."

They left at noon on Thursday with a thermos of coffee she wouldn't drink and a playlist he'd made in secret two weeks earlier, which she pretended not to notice was carefully assembled. Somewhere past Coalinga the fields opened up gold and endless, and Dev reached over without looking and put his hand on her knee, and she covered it with hers, and neither of them said anything for eleven miles.


Marisol found the calendar note first, though Dev had written it: *5 yrs — do something?? (or nothing, also fine)*

"Nothing is not fine," she said, holding up the calendar in the kitchen doorway. He was scrambling eggs badly, the way he always did, too high a heat.

"I hedged," he admitted. "Last year you said the dinner reservation felt like homework."

She winced, because she had said that. Their anniversary fell in mid-October, the anniversary of the night they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and every year they'd tried to formalize it into something. Restaurants with tasting menus. A weekend in Asheville where it rained for three days. A cooking class where Dev nearly severed a fingertip.

"What if we just did the party again," she said.

"The housewarming?"

"Not the actual party. Wes doesn't even live there anymore. But that kind of thing. Cheap wine, chips in a bowl, people standing around in a kitchen." She set the calendar down. "That's the part I liked. You were the only person there who'd read the Sears catalog book."

"The Chicago architecture one."

"Nobody else cared."

He turned off the burner and considered the ruined eggs. "So we throw a party for our anniversary and don't tell anyone it's our anniversary."

"We could tell them. I just don't want a toast."

"No toast," he agreed. "I'll make the dip my mom makes."

They sent the invitations on a Tuesday — a group text, nine people, most of whom said yes. Marisol bought a bag of ice and three bottles of something under twelve dollars. Dev spent an hour arranging chairs and then moved them all back.

By ten the kitchen was crowded and loud, and somebody was arguing about a movie neither of them had seen. Dev caught her eye across the counter, raised his cup an inch. She raised hers back. That was the whole toast.


Marisol found the receipt while looking for stamps—a crumpled slip from the taqueria on Fourth Street, dated exactly five years ago. She smoothed it flat on the kitchen counter and laughed.

"Dev," she called. "You kept this?"

He came in from the balcony, still holding the watering can, and squinted at it. "That was our first date. You ordered wrong and I didn't correct you."

"I ordered the tongue tacos on purpose."

"You ordered them because you thought I'd be impressed."

"I *was* impressed," she said. "By myself."

They had talked vaguely about the anniversary for weeks, in the way people do when neither wants to be the one who cares more. Dev had bookmarked a tasting menu place downtown, one hundred and forty dollars a head, and had been quietly dreading the cost since October. Marisol had considered a weekend in Asheville and then remembered her sister's wedding shower fell on the same Saturday.

"We could just go back," Dev said, tapping the receipt. "To the taqueria."

"That's either very romantic or very cheap."

"It's both. That's why it works."

She thought about it. The taqueria had gotten a new awning last year and slightly worse salsa, but the booth by the window was still the booth by the window. "Okay," she said. "But we're getting the good tequila after. And I want to walk down to the river like we did."

"It was August then. It's going to be thirty-eight degrees."

"Then wear a coat, Devendra."

He put down the watering can and came around the counter to kiss the top of her head, which was the height he could reach comfortably without either of them adjusting. "Six o'clock?"

"Six-thirty. I have a call until six."

He wrote it on the whiteboard by the fridge—*Tacos. Anniversary. Coats.*—and underneath, because he couldn't help himself, drew a small lopsided heart she would pretend not to notice for three days.


The apartment smelled like burnt garlic, which was Dani's fault, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Ten years," Marcus said, setting two mugs on the coffee table. "Feels like it should require a permit."

Dani pulled her feet up onto the couch. "My mother keeps sending links to venues. Yesterday it was a barn in Sonoma."

"A barn."

"A very expensive barn."

They'd had the conversation about marriage enough times that it had worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket. Neither of them was against it, exactly. It had simply never risen to the top of the list, above the leaking dishwasher and Marcus's father's surgery and the year Dani spent finishing her certification.

"What do you actually want to do?" Marcus asked.

Dani thought about it. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and then thought better of it.

"I want to go back to the diner," she said. "The one on Fourth."

"It closed."

"It reopened. Different owners, same booths. I drove past it in March."

Marcus laughed. Their first date had been there, both of them too broke for anywhere else, splitting a plate of fries because Dani had claimed she wasn't hungry and then eaten most of them.

"That's it? That's the ten-year plan?"

"I want a booth and bad coffee and I want you to tell me about that documentary you watched, the one about the bees, because I pretended to listen the first time and I've felt guilty for six years."

"You did not listen."

"I did not."

He reached over and pressed his thumb against her ankle, an old habit. "Fine. Diner. But I'm buying my own fries."

"Absolutely not."

They went on a Tuesday, because the wait was shorter. The coffee was worse than either of them remembered. Dani ordered the fries anyway, and Marcus talked about the bees for eleven straight minutes, and she listened to all of it.


Marcus found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago that October. He'd bought a doorknob the day they signed the lease on the apartment on Fillmore.

"Look at this," he said, holding it up when Priya came in from the balcony with her cold coffee.

She squinted. "You kept that?"

"I keep everything. You've mentioned."

Seven years. They'd never had a wedding date to anchor themselves to, so they'd always used the lease. It felt honest to Priya—the day they'd decided to be responsible for the same set of rooms, the same electric bill, the same slow drip under the bathroom sink that neither of them had ever fixed.

"So what do you want to do?" she asked. "Somewhere nice? I could get us into Bellweather if I call Tuesday."

Marcus made a face. He hated restaurants where the waiter refolded your napkin.

"Okay, not Bellweather." She sat down on the arm of the couch. "The cabin place? The one with the terrible hot tub?"

"I liked the terrible hot tub."

"You complained about it for four hours."

"That's how I show affection."

She laughed and reached over to take the receipt from him, turning it in the light. The ink had gone brown at the edges.

"What if we just stayed here," she said. "I'll make the lamb. You do the thing with the potatoes."

"The thing with the potatoes takes two hours."

"We have two hours. We have a whole Saturday."

He considered it. Outside, someone was parallel parking badly, edging back and forth with the patience of a person who had nowhere to be.

"Fine," he said. "But we're fixing the sink first. Seven years is long enough."

Priya put the receipt back in the drawer, underneath the batteries, where they'd find it again.


Mira found the receipt tucked in a book she hadn't opened since spring: two tickets to a matinee, the theater downtown that smelled like burnt sugar. Seven years ago that month. She brought it to the kitchen, where Deshawn was standing at the counter with his laptop open, scowling at a spreadsheet.

"Look what I found."

He took it, squinted. "That's the one where you fell asleep."

"I did not fall asleep."

"You put your head on my shoulder and made a noise."

"That's called being comfortable."

He laughed and set the receipt on the windowsill, propped against the little clay pot where the basil had died in July. "So what do we want to do? Seven's a weird number. Not a milestone."

"Every year's a milestone. That's kind of the point of not having a wedding."

They'd had this conversation in various forms. Neither of them was against marriage exactly; it just kept failing to become urgent. Meanwhile there was the mortgage, the dog, her mother's chemo last winter, his brother's kids at Thanksgiving. Life had accumulated around them like snow.

"We could go back to the theater," Deshawn said.

"It's a vape shop now."

"Right." He drummed his fingers. "Okay. What if we don't go anywhere. What if we cook the thing."

"The thing" was a duck they'd attempted their second year together and ruined spectacularly, filling the apartment with smoke, ending up eating cereal at midnight, laughing so hard the downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling.

Mira considered. "That's either very romantic or a cry for help."

"Both. And this time I'll actually read the recipe."

"I want it on the record that I read the recipe last time."

"Noted." He pulled her in by the belt loop, briefly, the way he did when he was about to go back to work. "Saturday?"

"Saturday," she said, and put the receipt in her pocket.


Marcus found the receipt while looking for a stamp—crumpled in the junk drawer, faded ink from a diner in Wilmington, dated seven years ago that Saturday. He set it on the kitchen counter where Priya would see it.

She noticed it while making coffee. "You kept this?"

"I keep everything. You've seen the closet."

They'd stopped at that diner on the drive back from her cousin's wedding, the first trip they'd taken together, when neither of them was sure yet what they were doing. Priya had ordered pie she didn't want just to stay in the booth longer.

"So what do you want to do?" she asked. "Seven years."

Marcus had thought about it. He'd looked up a restaurant downtown with tasting menus and a wine pairing, then closed the tab. "Honestly? I'd rather not spend two hundred dollars to be uncomfortable."

"Thank God." Priya sat down across from him with her mug. "I've been dreading you booking somewhere fancy."

"Then what?"

She looked around the kitchen—the cabinet door that still didn't close right, the calendar with both their handwriting on it, the plant she'd rescued from his old apartment. "We could drive back to Wilmington."

"That's four hours."

"Six with traffic. We could leave early, get pie, come back."

Marcus considered it. It was absurd. It was also exactly the kind of thing they'd done in the first year, before jobs got serious and the mortgage happened.

"I'll make a playlist," he said.

They left at seven that Saturday. The diner had changed owners and the pie was worse than they remembered, but they sat in a booth by the window for two hours anyway, and Priya took a photo of the receipt next to the old one.

On the drive home, somewhere past Baltimore, she fell asleep against the window. Marcus turned the music down and kept driving.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Casa Duran, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Theo came in from the garage, sawdust still on his forearms.

"You kept this?"

"You kept it," he said. "I thought it fell behind the fridge."

They had never agreed on what to call that night. She said first date; he insisted it was two acquaintances splitting enchiladas because both their roommates were having parties. Either way, seven years. The apartment in Cleveland, then the sublet in Pittsburgh, now this narrow house in Lakewood with the crooked back steps he kept meaning to fix.

"We could go back," she said. "Casa Duran's still open. I checked."

Theo washed his hands at the kitchen sink, thinking. "It's a Tuesday."

"It was a Tuesday then, too."

He liked the symmetry of it, but there was something too neat about it, like a photograph staged for other people. "What if we did the thing we actually do," he said. "Order from Casa Duran, eat on the porch. Then walk down to the lake."

Marisol considered. She had wanted an occasion—a reservation, a reason to wear the green dress. But she also knew that the best hours of the last seven years had been unremarkable ones: him reading aloud from the newspaper, her falling asleep against him during movies neither of them finished.

"Both," she said. "Restaurant this year. Porch next year."

"That's a lot of forward planning for someone who won't commit to a dentist."

She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it, grinning, and put it over his shoulder.

They went on the Tuesday. She wore the green dress. The enchiladas were worse than they remembered, which struck them both as funny, and they walked the six blocks home slowly, arguing pleasantly about what to call it.


The Fifth of October

Dana found the receipt in a coat pocket while sorting laundry—a faded slip from Marchetti's, October 5th, five years ago. The night Owen had spilled red wine on her white blouse and she'd laughed so hard the waiter came over to check on them.

"Look what I found," she said, holding it up when he came in from the garage.

Owen took the paper and squinted. "I can't believe you kept the blouse."

"I can't believe you kept the receipt. It was in your coat."

He shrugged, setting down a bag of potting soil. "Seemed important."

They'd talked about the anniversary vaguely for weeks—*we should do something*—but neither had made a plan. Now they stood in the kitchen, the receipt between them, and it felt like a deadline had arrived.

"We could go back," Owen said. "Marchetti's."

Dana wrinkled her nose. "It got bought out. They took the tortellini off the menu."

"So no."

"So no."

She leaned against the counter, thinking. Their house was small and half-renovated, the hallway still missing baseboards. Five years of accumulating things: a dog, a mortgage they'd both signed, her mother's dishes, his terrible record collection.

"What if we just cooked?" she said. "Made the tortellini ourselves. Badly."

Owen considered this. "We'd need one of those pasta machines."

"We'd need a lot of things."

But he was already pulling out his phone, and by evening there was a used Marcato ordered from a woman in Tacoma, and a shopping list on the fridge in two different handwritings.

On the fifth, they made a mess of the kitchen. The pasta came out thick in places, translucent in others. The sauce was too salty. They ate it at the table with the dog begging underneath, and Dana wore the white blouse, and Owen, reaching for the wine, was very, very careful.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries — a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, September 14, 2018. Twelve dollars for a shower curtain rod and a set of hooks, the first thing they'd bought together for the apartment on Rosemont.

"Seven years next Sunday," she said, holding it up when Theo came in from the garage.

He took the receipt, turned it over, laughed at his own handwriting on the back: *ask about the leaky one*. "We never did fix that faucet."

"We moved."

They'd talked about doing something big. Theo's sister kept sending links to a bed and breakfast in Galena with claw-foot tubs and a two-night minimum. Marisol had priced out flights to Santa Fe twice and closed the tab both times, thinking about her mother's hip surgery in October and the water heater making that sound again.

"We could just do dinner," Theo said. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

"We could." She was quiet a moment, wiping the counter for no reason. "Or we could do the hardware store thing."

He looked up.

"Delgado's is still there. We go, we buy something stupid and useful. Then we cook. I make the thing with the short ribs, you make the drinks you're always bragging about."

Theo considered it. It was cheaper, which mattered, but that wasn't why he liked it. "We'd have to actually install whatever we buy."

"Obviously."

So that Sunday they walked eleven blocks to Delgado's and spent forty minutes debating drawer pulls, and the guy at the register — not Delgado, Delgado had died in 2021 — told them the brass ones would hold up better. They bought brass. Theo hung the last one at four in the afternoon while Marisol browned short ribs and complained about the smoke detector.

They ate late, at the table, with paper towels for napkins. Neither of them minded.


The apartment smelled like burnt coffee, which was Dev's fault, and neither of them said anything about it.

"Ten years," Marisol said, sitting cross-legged on the couch with her laptop balanced on a cushion. "That's a decade. People get plaques for a decade."

"You want a plaque?"

"I want something that isn't a restaurant where they fold the napkins into shapes."

Dev sat down on the arm of the couch. He'd been thinking about this for weeks, actually, in the low-grade way he thought about most things—turning it over during his commute, abandoning it, picking it back up. He had a list on his phone. Item one was *tasting menu*, which he now deleted.

"What about the cabin," he said. "The one near Point Reyes. Where the heater broke."

"That was the worst weekend of my life."

"It was the third night. We got the fire going and you said—"

"I know what I said." She was smiling at the screen, not at him, which he'd learned years ago was still a smile aimed his way. "That place is probably four hundred a night now."

"So we split it."

She looked up. "We could just stay here. Order the Thai place. Watch the whole first season of that show we abandoned."

"On our tenth."

"On our tenth." She shrugged. "Nobody's grading us."

Dev thought about the plaque, and the napkins, and the ten years of Tuesdays that had somehow accumulated into this—her sock feet on his knee, the burnt coffee, the argument about the heater they'd been having since 2016.

"Thai," he said. "But I'm getting the good wine. The one that's twenty-two dollars."

"Big spender."

"Ten years," he said, and reached for the phone.


Marguerite found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from the Thai place on Fourth Street, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Danny came in from the garage, sawdust still on his forearms.

"Do you remember what we ordered?"

He squinted. "Pad see ew. And you got that soup you couldn't finish."

"Tom kha. And you finished it."

They'd been debating for two weeks how to mark it. Seven years since that first dinner, six since they'd signed a lease together in Cedar Rapids, three since they'd bought the little blue house with the terrible bathroom tile. Danny wanted to go somewhere—Galena, maybe, or a bed and breakfast up near the Mississippi. Marguerite kept doing math on the back of envelopes and coming up short.

"We could just go back to the Thai place," she said.

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a nail salon."

She laughed. "Everything becomes a nail salon."

He leaned against the counter, thinking. "What if we cooked it? The whole meal. We've got that wok your mother gave us that we've used twice."

"You'd have to find galangal."

"There's that market on Wilson."

So that Saturday they drove out together, wandering the aisles, arguing pleasantly over whether the recipe really needed palm sugar. Danny bought a bundle of lemongrass and held it like a bouquet. At home they cooked badly and slowly, the kitchen filling with steam, the radio on. The pad see ew came out too salty. The soup was better than either expected.

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room still had drywall dust in the corners. Marguerite pinned the old receipt to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Iowa.

"Eight years," Danny said, "we're doing Galena."

"Deal," she said, and meant it.


Marisol found the receipt from Nguyen's Deli in the junk drawer, folded into a square so small it had gone soft at the creases. Ten years old. The date printed at the top was the same date circled on the calendar hanging above the coffee maker.

"You kept this," she said, holding it up.

Theo looked over from the sink, hands wet. "I kept the sandwich wrapper too, for about a month. Then it started to smell like a crime."

They had met over banh mi, standing in line behind a woman arguing about pickled carrots, and Theo had said something so unfunny that Marisol had laughed out of pity. Ten years later they owned a house together in Sacramento with a lemon tree that produced more lemons than two people could reasonably use.

"So what do we do," Marisol said. "Something big?"

"We could go back to the deli."

"It closed in 2019."

"Right." Theo dried his hands. "Then we do the thing where we drive out to the coast and I complain about the fog."

She considered it. Their friends had done vow renewals, weekend trips to Napa, one couple had gotten matching tattoos of a seagull for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained. None of it fit. She and Theo had never wanted a wedding, and this wasn't a substitute for one.

"What if we made banh mi," she said. "Badly. Here."

Theo smiled slowly. "We'd have to buy a whole daikon."

"We'd have to buy two whole daikons, because you'll ruin the first one."

They went to the Asian market on Stockton Boulevard that Saturday and bought pork belly and cilantro and a baguette that shattered when Theo tried to cut it. The sandwiches were mediocre. They ate them on the back steps under the lemon tree, and Marisol tucked the receipt into her wallet, where she could find it again in another ten years.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that terrible open mic in Somerville, and Priya still couldn't decide what the occasion demanded.

"We could do Alden's," Marcus said from the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "The place with the duck."

"We did Alden's for my promotion. And your birthday." She was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, surrounded by the contents of a shoebox she'd pulled from the closet—ticket stubs, a napkin with his handwriting on it, a photo from the summer they'd driven to Nova Scotia in a car with no air conditioning.

He came and sat down beside her, knees cracking. He was forty-one now. He picked up the napkin. "'Call me, I'm the one in the ugly jacket.' God, that jacket."

"It was very ugly."

"You called."

"I did." She leaned into his shoulder.

They had talked about marriage a few times, seriously twice, and had landed both times in the same place: not opposed, not moved. Her parents had asked. His had stopped. What they had instead was a mortgage in Roslindale, a joint account they were both bad at reconciling, and a dog named Chowder who had opinions about the couch.

"What if we didn't go out," Marcus said. "What if we made the thing we made that first winter. The disgusting stew."

"It wasn't disgusting."

"It was mostly potatoes."

"We were broke." She thought about it. "Okay. Stew. And we watch the Nova Scotia pictures. And you have to tell the story about the ferry, even though I was there."

"I tell it better than it happened."

"That's why."

He got up to check the pantry for potatoes. Priya stayed on the floor a moment longer with the shoebox open in her lap, then started putting the pieces back in, one at a time, in no particular order.


The apartment smelled like burnt toast, which was Danny's fault, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Seven years," Priya said, scrolling through her phone at the kitchen table. "That feels like it should mean something."

Danny scraped the black off with a butter knife. "It means we've outlasted your car."

"My car is still running."

"Barely." He set a plate down in front of her and sat. "So what do you want to do? We could try that Basque place on Fillmore. I could probably get a reservation if I call now."

Priya made a face. She'd made the same face at his last three suggestions, which was how they'd ended up at ten in the morning with no plan and a day off from both their jobs.

"It's not that I don't want to go out," she said. "It's that going out feels like proving something. To who? The waiter?"

"To the waiter, mainly." Danny bit into his toast. "He's been asking."

She laughed and reached across the table to steal his coffee. "What if we drove up to Point Reyes? We haven't been since—"

"Since the thing with the flat tire."

"Since the thing with the flat tire. And we could get sandwiches from that deli in Olema, and just walk on the beach and be cold."

"That's the pitch? Be cold?"

"Be cold together," she said. "That's the whole relationship, honestly."

He considered it. Outside, the fog hadn't burned off, which meant it probably wouldn't. "We'd have to leave in the next hour to beat the traffic."

"So get dressed."

"I'm making a new piece of toast first."

"Fine." Priya stood, kissed the top of his head, and went to find her boots. From the bedroom she called, "Do we have a blanket in the car?"

"We have three blankets in the car. We have a blanket problem."

"Good," she said. "Bring all of them."


The apartment smelled like burnt coffee, which was how Nadia knew Theo had been up since five.

"Ten years," he said, when she came into the kitchen. He was standing at the counter in the gray sweatshirt she'd bought him two Christmases ago, the cuffs gone soft and stringy. "Ten years since the bookstore."

She poured herself a cup and didn't correct him, though technically the bookstore had been the second time they met. The first had been at a party neither of them remembered clearly.

"I thought maybe Perrine's," she said. "That place on Wabash. Erica said the tasting menu takes three hours."

Theo made a face. "Three hours."

"It's a milestone."

"It's a Tuesday."

She sat down at the table, which wobbled because they'd never gotten around to fixing the leg. Ten years of that wobble. "So what do you want to do?"

He turned around and leaned against the counter, holding his mug with both hands the way he did when he was thinking. "I want to go back to the bookstore. And then I want to get sandwiches from that place with the terrible awning, and eat them on the steps of the art museum, and then come home and watch something stupid."

"That's not a milestone."

"It's ten years of exactly that," he said. "That's the milestone."

Nadia looked at him for a moment. Outside, someone was scraping ice off a windshield in long, patient strokes.

"Sandwiches," she said finally. "But I'm getting the one with the pickled onions, and you're not allowed to complain about my breath afterward."

"I'd never."

"You do it every time."

"I complain lovingly."

She stood up and kissed the side of his head on her way to the shower. He caught her wrist briefly, not saying anything, and then let go.

The bookstore opened at ten.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Chen's Noodle House, dated seven years ago that October.

"You kept this?" she asked, holding it up when Dev came in from the garage.

He squinted. "That's the night your car wouldn't start and we walked twelve blocks in the rain."

"You kept it," she repeated.

"I keep everything. You've seen the closet."

They'd been arguing gently for two weeks about what to do. Dev wanted to go back to Chen's, which had since changed owners and, according to reviews, changed for the worse. Marisol wanted to drive up the coast to a place with a wine list and a view. Neither had budged, mostly because neither felt strongly enough to push.

"Here's a thought," Dev said, setting down a coil of extension cord. "What if we did nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Not nothing. I mean — we don't leave. I cook. You pick the movie. We put the phones in the drawer."

Marisol considered it. Their house was small and full of things they'd assembled together: the crooked bookshelf, the succulent that refused to die, the couch they'd carried up the porch steps at midnight because the delivery window had been missed. She'd spent seven years choosing this, unofficially, over and over.

"You'd have to make the lemon thing," she said.

"Obviously the lemon thing."

On the night itself, it rained, which felt appropriate. Dev burned the garlic and started over. Marisol opened a bottle they'd been saving without knowing what for. They ate at the kitchen table because the dining table was covered in her half-finished quilting project, and neither of them suggested moving it.

Afterward, she found the receipt again and tucked it into the cookbook, at the lemon chicken page.

"Eight next year," Dev said.

"Eight," she agreed, and turned out the light.


The rain had been falling since Tuesday, which was how Marisol found herself sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with a shoebox of receipts instead of hiking the ridge trail they'd planned.

"Seven years," Dev said from the kitchen doorway, holding two mugs. "We should do something."

"We are doing something. I'm reorganizing our tax documents."

He set a mug beside her and lowered himself onto the rug, knees cracking in a way that made them both laugh. Seven years ago he'd been able to sit down without commentary.

"I found the ticket stub," she said, holding up a faded rectangle. "From the movie."

"The terrible one."

"You cried."

"I had allergies."

She let it go, the way she'd been letting it go since 2018. Outside, the gutter Dev kept meaning to fix overflowed in a steady sheet past the window.

"Okay," he said. "Options. There's that Portuguese place downtown. Reservation's probably impossible, but I could try."

"Or."

"Or?"

Marisol pulled a folded paper from the box — a printout of the first apartment listing they'd looked at together, the one with the crooked kitchen and the landlord who'd smelled like cigars. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"We could drive by it," she said. "It's forty minutes. We could get sandwiches from that deli that's probably still there and eat them in the car like criminals."

Dev looked at the paper for a long moment. "That's very stupid."

"I know."

"I love it."

They went on Saturday. The building had been repainted a color that could charitably be called salmon. The deli had become a vape shop, so they ate gas station sandwiches instead, windows fogging, rain drumming the roof.

"Happy anniversary," Dev said.

Marisol reached over and wiped mustard off his chin, and neither of them said anything else for a while.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for a battery — a faded slip from Hong Kong Palace, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Dev came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag.

"You kept this?"

"I kept everything from that year," he said. "There's a movie ticket in there too, I think. And that parking stub from when we got towed."

They had been together seven years, in this house for four, and had never quite settled on how to observe the date. Their friends had weddings to anchor them; Marisol and Dev had a first date at a Chinese restaurant where she'd ordered wrong on purpose to see if he'd laugh at her.

"We could just go back," she said. "Hong Kong Palace."

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a nail place."

She made a face. "Depressing."

Dev leaned against the counter. "What if we didn't go anywhere. What if we cooked the same thing here. I still remember what you got. The eggplant thing you hated."

"I didn't hate it."

"You ate three bites and then stole my rice."

They negotiated it over the next week in small pieces, the way they decided most things — while brushing teeth, while folding towels. Marisol wanted to invite her sister; Dev wanted it to be just them. They compromised: dinner alone on Friday, brunch with her sister Sunday. He would handle the eggplant. She would find the wine they'd split on the drive home that first night, some cheap Malbec whose label she'd only half-remembered.

On Friday the eggplant came out too salty. They ate it anyway, at the kitchen table, the receipt propped against the pepper grinder like a small monument. Marisol raised her glass.

"Seven years of you not fixing the garage door."

"Eight, if I make it another year," Dev said, and touched his glass to hers.


Marisol found the receipt in a coat pocket in late October—crumpled, faded, from a diner in Bloomington that had closed two years ago. She flattened it on the kitchen counter and stared at the date until Dev came in with the recycling bin.

"Seven years next Thursday," she said.

He set the bin down. "From the pancakes?"

"From the pancakes."

They had never been good at anniversaries. There had been no proposal, no ceremony, just a slow accumulation of shared leases and split utility bills and a cat neither of them had planned on. Their friends had stopped asking when. Marisol's mother had not.

Dev pulled a stool up to the counter. "We could do something," he said, in the careful voice he used when he wasn't sure whether he wanted something or just thought he should.

"Something like what?"

"Dinner somewhere with cloth napkins."

Marisol made a face. She hated the performance of it—the waiter asking if they were celebrating, the assumption of an engagement, the flicker of pity when there wasn't one.

"What if we didn't," she said. "What if we just took the day off."

He considered this. "Both of us?"

"Both of us. No plans. We stay in bed until ten. You make the eggs the way you do when nobody's watching."

"With too much butter."

"With the correct amount of butter."

Dev laughed and reached across the counter for the receipt, turning it over in his fingers like a coin. He remembered the diner—Marisol had ordered coffee and then not drunk it, too nervous, and he'd thought that was the most charming thing he'd ever seen.

"Okay," he said. "Nothing. Deliberately nothing."

She took the receipt back and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Indiana.

On Thursday it rained. They didn't get out of bed until eleven.