The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept adding things to it.

"Two days," Marcus said from the doorway, holding two travel mugs. "You've packed four sweaters."

"Three. The gray one is a cardigan." She took the coffee, kissed his cheek, and rolled the fourth sweater in anyway. "It's the coast in October. You'll be cold and I'll be the one with options."

He didn't argue, because she was usually right about weather, and because he'd learned in three years of sharing a lease that some arguments cost more than they returned. He went instead to the kitchen and dealt with the practical inventory: milk poured down the drain, the half-carton of strawberries bagged for the road, the thermostat nudged down to sixty. He wrote *Sunday night* on a sticky note and pressed it to the coffee maker for reasons neither of them could have explained.

"Did you text Priya about the plants?" he called.

"She has the spare key. She's watering Tuesday, which is after we're back, so really it's for nothing."

"It's for the plants' morale."

By nine-fifteen they were in the driveway, arguing pleasantly about trunk geometry. Marcus's duffel went in first, then her suitcase, then the cooler bag wedged sideways, then the pillow she refused to travel without. Dana locked the front door, tried it, unlocked and relocked it, and stood a moment on the step looking at the little house with its crooked porch light.

"Ready?" he asked, engine idling.

"Phone, wallet, charger, the reservation is in my email." She dropped into the passenger seat and pulled up the map. "Two hours forty, if the bridge cooperates."

"It won't."

"It won't," she agreed, and put her bare feet on the dashboard, and found the playlist she'd made on Thursday night while pretending to work.

He backed out slowly, watching the mailbox. The house shrank in the mirror. Then the turn onto the main road, and the coffee going lukewarm, and forty miles of ordinary highway before anything felt like vacation.


Marisol found the duffel bag in the hall closet, behind the vacuum and a box of Christmas lights they'd never gotten around to putting away. She dragged it out and unzipped it on the bed, where Theo was already folding shirts with the exaggerated precision of someone who had watched a video about it once.

"Two nights," he said. "That's four shirts, max."

"It's two nights. One night." She counted on her fingers. "We leave tomorrow morning, come back Sunday. That's one sleep."

Theo paused with a flannel in his hands. "Then why did you say two-day getaway?"

"Because it's two days. Friday and Saturday. Sunday's just driving."

He conceded the point and put two shirts back in the drawer. Marisol went through the kitchen, emptying the coffee pot, checking the stove knobs twice, moving the half-carton of milk to the front of the fridge where she'd see it Sunday night and remember to smell it before using it. She wrote a note for their neighbor Cheryl about the mail and stuck it to the door with a magnet shaped like Ohio, which neither of them had ever visited.

In the morning it was still gray out. Theo carried the duffel and the cooler down to the car while Marisol did a final circuit — bathroom light off, curling iron unplugged, back door locked, thermostat nudged down to sixty-two. She stood in the living room a moment listening to the house being quiet.

Outside, Theo had the trunk open and was rearranging things that didn't need rearranging. She handed him her jacket, got in, and adjusted the seat forward even though she wasn't driving.

"Gas first," he said, "then coffee."

"Coffee first."

He backed out of the driveway, and she put her feet on the dash, and the neighborhood slid away behind them, ordinary and unremarkable and easy to leave for a day and a half.


Maya found the duffel bag in the back of the hall closet, wedged behind a box of Christmas lights they'd never gotten around to putting up last December.

"It smells like the basement," she called out.

Dev came in from the kitchen holding two travel mugs. "It's been in the closet since Asheville."

"Which was two years ago."

He set the mugs on the entry table and unzipped the bag, sniffing it. He made a face. "It's fine. We'll leave it open in the car."

They packed on the bed, which was the only surface big enough. Maya rolled her clothes because she'd read somewhere it saved space; Dev folded his in flat squares and pressed them down with his palm. She put in a sweater, took it out, put it back in. He asked whether the cabin had a hair dryer, and she said she'd checked the listing twice and it did, and also that she'd brought her own anyway.

At ten Dev went outside to warm up the car and scrape the windshield. Maya stood in the kitchen doing the last things: emptying the coffee grounds, wiping the counter, moving the milk to the front of the fridge so it wouldn't get lost behind the leftovers. She set out an extra bowl of dry food for the cat, then texted their neighbor Ruth to confirm she'd come by Sunday morning.

Dev came back rubbing his hands. "Trash?"

"Already did it."

They walked out together, Maya carrying the duffel, Dev carrying the cooler and the pillow he refused to travel without. He put everything in the trunk while she checked the front door twice, then a third time.

In the car she plugged in her phone and pulled up the directions. Three hours and twenty minutes, no traffic yet. Dev backed out of the driveway, and Maya turned the heat down one notch and handed him his coffee.


The alarm went off at five-thirty, which Dana had insisted on and Marcus had argued against, and now neither of them could remember why it had mattered so much. He hit the snooze once. She got up anyway and put coffee on, standing in the kitchen of the duplex they'd rented together for two years, listening to the radiator tick.

"Did you pack the phone chargers?" she called.

"Both of them. And the good one."

She found him in the hallway wrestling a duffel bag zipper. His hair was flat on one side. She smoothed it down without comment, and he leaned into her hand for a second before going back to the zipper.

The plan was two nights at a cabin four hours north, near a lake that would probably still be too cold for swimming. Marcus had booked it in January during a stretch of gray weeks when the idea of trees had seemed medicinal.

They argued mildly about the cooler. Dana thought it was excessive for two days. Marcus pointed out that the nearest grocery store was twenty minutes from the cabin, and that last time they'd eaten crackers for dinner. She conceded the cooler. He packed it: eggs, bacon, a block of cheddar, the good mustard, four beers, and a carton of half-and-half because she took her coffee pale.

At six-forty he backed the Corolla out while she locked the front door twice, checked it, and then checked it again. The neighbor's cat watched from a porch railing. Dana got in, put her feet on the dashboard until Marcus gave her a look, then put them down.

He merged onto the highway. She found a station playing something from the nineties and turned it up. Outside, the strip malls thinned into fields, and the sun came up over a line of bare trees, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, which was fine.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like a mouth waiting to be fed, and Delia stood over it holding two sweaters she couldn't choose between.

"It's going to be fifty-five degrees," Marcus called from the bathroom, where he was counting out pills into a plastic organizer. "You know that, right? Fifty-five and rain Saturday afternoon."

"I heard you the first four times." She put both sweaters in.

They had lived together three years in the little rented house on Alder Street, long enough that packing had become a kind of choreography. He handled the car — oil checked Tuesday, tires topped off, the aux cord untangled and coiled in the console. She handled everything else: the snacks in the canvas tote, the reservation confirmation printed because he didn't trust his phone in the mountains, the note for the neighbor about the cat.

"Did you text Ronnie about Pepper?"

"Twice. He's coming at seven and again at seven tomorrow." She zipped the suitcase and had to sit on it to get the last few inches.

Marcus came out with the pill organizer, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead where he would forget them. He looked at her sitting on the luggage and laughed, then took the handle and lifted it off the bed without comment, the way he'd been doing since her back went out in March.

They locked the back door, then the front. She checked the stove. He checked it again. Pepper watched from the windowsill with flat yellow disinterest.

In the driveway the morning was still gray and cold enough to see their breath. He backed out slowly, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching over to squeeze her knee.

"Two whole days," she said.

"Two whole days," he agreed, and turned onto the road going east, toward the part of the sky that was starting to go gold.


The alarm went off at five, and Dana slapped it quiet before it could wake Marcus. He woke anyway.

"You said six," he mumbled into the pillow.

"I said we'd leave by six. There's a difference."

He got up. That was one of the things she liked about him — he complained, then he got up. By five-thirty he had the coffee going and was standing in front of the open refrigerator in his boxers, assessing.

"The yogurt's going to go bad."

"Then eat it."

"I can't eat four yogurts, Dana."

"Bring them. There's a cooler in the garage."

She was upstairs by then, kneeling on the bedroom floor with her duffel bag open. Two days. Two shirts, one dress in case the restaurant was nicer than the website suggested, the hiking socks, the good sneakers. She heard him come up behind her and toss something into the bag — the charger she'd forgotten, the one for her phone, because he always remembered that and she never did.

"Did you text your sister about the mail?"

"She's got the key."

They loaded the car in the gray light, coffee thermos wedged between the seats, the cooler with four yogurts and a bag of baby carrots he'd insisted on. Marcus checked the back door twice. Dana sat in the passenger seat scrolling the route, and when he finally got in she said, "There's construction on 40. It's adding twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes isn't the end of the world."

"I didn't say it was the end of the world."

He backed out of the driveway. At the stop sign he reached over and put his hand flat on her knee, and she covered it with hers without looking up from the phone, and they turned east into a sky that was just starting to go orange over the rooftops.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter as if it had insulted her. Four years ago tonight, she and Marcus had walked out of a terrible open mic at a bar on Cherokee Street and kept walking, twenty-two blocks, until the sun came up over the Mississippi.

She texted him: *don't pick up food. i'm making the thing.*

*the thing?* he wrote back. *the shrimp thing?*

*the shrimp thing.*

By the time his key turned in the lock, she had rice going and had opened the wine they'd been saving since Christmas without any particular occasion in mind. Marcus set a paper bag on the table and pulled out a cheap bouquet from the corner store, carnations dyed an aggressive blue.

"They were the ugliest ones," he said. "I thought you'd appreciate that."

"I do." She kissed him, tasting cold air on his mouth. "There's garlic everywhere. Don't touch anything."

He didn't listen. He stood behind her at the stove, chin on her shoulder, until she elbowed him toward the cabinet for plates. Then he found the speaker and put on the album they'd argued about for the first three months they knew each other, and she groaned, and he turned it up.

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt formal enough to count as an occasion. Marcus told her about the guy at work who'd cried during a budget meeting. Dana admitted she'd almost bought a cake and then decided she'd rather have the wine.

Later, dishes stacked and lights low, she pulled her feet up under her and leaned into him.

"Four years," she said. "Longer than college."

"Better than college."

"Marginally."

He laughed and pulled the blanket over both of them, and outside a bus sighed to a stop, and neither of them moved for a long time.


Mara got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where the mail had accumulated into a small geological formation, and decided that tonight she would not be the kind of person who cleaned instead of cooking.

She put water on to boil. Six years ago tonight, in a bar on Cortland Avenue that had since become a poke restaurant, Devon had told her he thought he was probably going to fall in love with her, which she had found presumptuous and correct.

He came in at six-forty with a paper bag and stopped when he saw the stove going.

"You said we weren't doing anything," he said.

"We're not. It's pasta."

"I got the good bread." He set the bag down and pulled out a baguette, and then, more slowly, a small waxed-paper package. "And the cheese you like. The stinky one."

"Taleggio."

"The stinky one."

They ate at the table instead of on the couch, which felt formal enough to be funny. Devon lit the candle that had been in the drawer since a power outage in February and smelled faintly of vanilla and emergency.

"Six years," Mara said.

"Six years." He turned his glass by the stem. "My mother asked me about it."

"About what?"

"You know what."

Mara tore off a piece of bread. She had known this was coming, in the way you know weather is coming, and she found she wasn't dreading it. "What did you tell her?"

"That we're happy. That we'd figure it out on our own schedule." He looked up. "Was that right?"

"That was right." She reached across and took his hand, sauce on her fingers and all. "Ask me again in the spring."

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever you're going to ask."

Devon laughed and didn't let go of her hand, and outside the window a neighbor's dog started barking at nothing at all.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter and calculating. Three years ago tonight they'd sat on the floor of Theo's old apartment eating cold pad thai out of the container, and she had said, out loud, that she wanted this to be a thing, and he had said okay, like it was obvious.

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

Three dots. Then: *define cooking.*

*Rude.*

What she meant was that she was making the chicken thing with the lemon and too much garlic, the only recipe she'd ever memorized, which she had made for him in year one and burned, and in year two perfectly, and now made annually like a small stubborn ritual. She got the oven going and put on the playlist they fought about — he thought it was too much Fleetwood Mac; she thought there was no such thing.

Theo came in at six-forty with grocery bags anyway.

"You said don't stop."

"I bought ice cream. That's not stopping, that's arriving prepared." He kissed the side of her head, hung his coat on the chair instead of the hook, and she let it go. He found the bottle of wine they'd been saving since a wedding in June and started working the cork.

They ate at the actual table, which they'd been meaning to do more. He told her about the thing with his sister. She told him she'd finally emailed the woman about the studio space. Neither of them mentioned that his lease renewal was coming, or the argument from Sunday, though both were in the room with them, patient.

"Three years," Theo said, tipping his glass toward her.

"Three years," Dana said. "The chicken's better."

"The chicken's incredible."

Later they ate the ice cream out of the carton on the couch, arguing pleasantly about a movie neither of them wanted to watch.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway with her keys still in her hand, looking at the apartment the way a stranger might: the couch with the sagging left cushion, the philodendron they'd nearly killed twice, the crooked stack of Ethan's records by the window. Four years. She set down the grocery bag and started pulling things out.

Ethan came in at six-forty, apologizing before the door was fully open. "The 14 was rerouted, I had to walk from Pine—" He stopped. There were candles on the table, the mismatched ones from the junk drawer, and a bowl of clementines because he liked them and she never bought them.

"You said no gifts," he said.

"Clementines aren't a gift. They're produce."

He held up a paper bag. "This is also produce." Inside was a bottle of the Portuguese wine they'd had on their first real trip together, the one where they'd argued about directions for three hours and then laughed about it for four years.

"That's cheating."

"You made a whole table."

They cooked together, badly, the way they always did—Dana chopping too slowly, Ethan salting too much, both of them reaching for the same wooden spoon. They ate on the couch with plates on their knees because the candles had made the table feel too formal, too much like a performance. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Four years," Ethan said. "My mother asked again."

"I know. Mine too." Dana pulled her feet up under her. "What did you say?"

"I said we're happy." He looked over at her. "Was that right?"

She thought about it honestly, the way she wanted to be able to do with him for a long time.

"Yeah," she said. "That's right."

They finished the wine and left the dishes until morning.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of their apartment holding a paper bag of groceries, listening to the radiator tick, and felt briefly like a stranger in her own life. Four years ago tonight she had been sitting on a curb outside a bar in Somerville, telling Miguel she didn't usually do this, and he had said, "Do what?" and she had said, "Like someone this fast."

She put the pasta water on. She was terrible at cooking and good at buying things, so she'd bought good bread, a wedge of cheese the guy at the counter recommended, and a bottle of wine that cost more than she'd meant to spend.

Miguel came in at six-forty, snow melting on his shoulders, carrying a bakery box that he set on the counter with exaggerated care.

"You didn't," she said.

"I absolutely did." He opened it: a small chocolate cake, the kind with too much frosting. "They only had 'Happy Birthday' or blank. I went blank."

"Wise."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. Miguel had queued up a movie neither of them intended to finish. Dana asked him if he remembered what she'd been wearing that first night, and he described the green jacket in such specific detail — the missing button, the cigarette burn on the cuff — that she had to look away for a second.

"People keep asking us," he said, later, refilling her glass.

"I know."

"I'm not asking."

"I know that too." She leaned into his shoulder. "Ask me in a year."

"That's what you said last year."

"And here we are," she said, "still here," which was, they both understood, the whole point of the evening.


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel abandoned his plan to grill.

"We could still do it," Priya said, peering out the kitchen window at the gray sheets coming down on their patio. "You have that umbrella."

"The one that broke in March?"

"Details." She turned back to the counter, where she was slicing tomatoes with more concentration than the task required. Three years. It felt both longer and shorter than that — longer because she couldn't quite remember what her apartment in Somerville had looked like, shorter because she still sometimes woke up mildly surprised to find him there, taking up two-thirds of the mattress.

Daniel moved the chicken to a pan on the stove. "Cast iron's fine. Better, honestly. I've been reading about the crust you get."

"You've been reading about crust."

"I contain multitudes."

She laughed and handed him the cutting board. He'd bought a bottle of wine on his way home — not expensive, but from the small shop on Warren Street instead of the grocery store, which for him constituted a gesture. She'd made the salad dressing from scratch, whisking the mustard in the way his mother had shown her last Thanksgiving.

They ate at the actual table instead of on the couch. Halfway through, Priya put down her fork.

"Do you remember what you said to me? That first night, outside the bar?"

"I said I'd text you."

"You said you *hoped* you'd text me. Which I thought was strange."

"I was managing expectations."

"You texted me at seven the next morning."

"Expectations were exceeded." He refilled her glass. Outside, the rain kept going, steady and unhurried, and neither of them suggested turning on the television. They stayed at the table long after the plates were empty, arguing pleasantly about whether the chicken had, in fact, achieved a superior crust.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana came home from the clinic with her hair flattened and her shoes making small complaints on the hallway tile. Miguel was already in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up, arguing with a recipe on his phone.

"It says to reduce the wine by half," he said. "How am I supposed to know when it's half?"

"Look at the pot." She kissed the back of his neck and dropped her bag on a chair. "Four years ago tonight you told me you didn't cook."

"Four years ago tonight I was trying to seem mysterious."

They had agreed on no gifts, which meant they had both broken the agreement in small ways. Dana had bought a bottle of the Rioja they drank at that terrible tapas place near her old apartment, the one with the accordion player who wouldn't leave their table. Miguel had ordered a print of the Metro-North timetable from the year they spent taking turns riding an hour each way, and had it framed badly, the mat slightly crooked, which she would notice and not mention.

He burned the garlic. She fished the black bits out with a spoon while he started over, and they ate at seven-thirty at the small table by the window, watching the rain come down orange under the streetlight.

"My mother asked again," Miguel said.

"I know. Mine too. Easter."

"What did you tell her?"

"That we're happy." Dana turned her glass by the stem. "That we'll figure it out when we figure it out."

He nodded. It was an old conversation, worn smooth, not painful anymore, just there, like a stone in a pocket.

Afterward they left the dishes and watched half of a movie neither of them had chosen carefully. She fell asleep against his shoulder before the second act. He didn't wake her. He turned the volume down instead, and sat there a while, listening to the rain.


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel got home early — the crew had packed up the scaffolding and called it a day. He found Nora already in the kitchen of their apartment, sleeves shoved to her elbows, arguing with a recipe on her phone.

"You're supposed to be at work," she said, not looking up.

"Rained out. You're supposed to be at work too."

"Took a half day." She held up a bulb of fennel like evidence. "I was going to have this finished before you got here."

Four years. They'd started counting from a Tuesday in October, a bad first date at a bar on Cedar that had somehow lasted until two in the morning. Neither of them could remember what they'd talked about, only that the bartender had eventually stopped asking if they wanted anything else.

Daniel took off his boots by the door and washed his hands. "Give me something to do."

"Slice these thin. Not like last time."

"Last time was rustic."

"Last time was a hazard."

They worked in the narrow galley, bumping hips, trading the one good knife back and forth. Nora put on the record her brother had given them, the one with the scratch in the third song. Daniel opened the wine they'd been saving since August, which was really just a twelve-dollar bottle they kept forgetting about.

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail lived. The fennel was good. The chicken was slightly overdone and they agreed not to mention it, then mentioned it.

"Next year we should go somewhere," Nora said.

"You said that last year."

"I know. I mean it more this time."

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


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel had to abandon the idea of grilling. He stood at the kitchen window with a beer, watching water pool in the low spot of the patio where he kept meaning to fix the drainage, and then he turned around and started pulling things out of the refrigerator instead.

Priya came home at five-thirty with her hair flattened and a paper bag from the Italian place on Warren Street.

"You bought food," Daniel said.

"You said you were cooking."

"I was going to grill."

"It's been raining since three." She set the bag down and looked at the counter, where he'd assembled chicken thighs, a lemon, a head of garlic he hadn't peeled yet. "Okay. So we have two dinners."

"We have dinner and we have tomorrow's lunch." He took the bag from her and put it in the fridge, and she let him, and then she went to change out of her work clothes.

Four years. They had agreed, sometime in the second year, that it counted from the night in October when she had stayed over and then simply not gone home for three days. There had been no conversation about it. Her toothbrush had appeared in the cup by his sink and neither of them had mentioned it, which Daniel still considered the most romantic thing that had ever happened to him.

She came back in sweatpants and put on a record, something with horns. He browned the chicken. She sat on the counter beside the stove, which he had asked her many times not to do, and drank his beer, and told him about a coworker who had cried in a meeting.

They ate at the table with the overhead light off. Around nine the rain let up. Priya suggested a walk; Daniel said he'd get his shoes, and did.


The rain started around four, which Dana took as a good sign. Nothing forced them inside like weather did.

She got home first and put the chicken in to roast, then stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the living room — the coffee table with its rings, the couch with the blanket thrown over the arm where the cat had shredded it. Six years ago tonight, in a bar on Delmar that had since become a vape shop, Miguel had asked if she wanted to split an order of fries. That was the whole origin story. They'd agreed years ago it was too small a thing to make a fuss over, and then made a small fuss over it every October anyway.

Miguel came in at six-fifteen shaking water off his jacket. "There's a downed limb on Sutter," he said. "Whole street's blocked." He set a paper bag on the counter — a bottle of the Portuguese red they liked, and, because he could never help himself, a bag of the sour candy she kept in her desk at work.

"You didn't have to."

"It was on the way." He looked at the oven. "How long?"

"Twenty minutes. Set the table?"

He did, badly, forks on the wrong side, and she didn't correct him. They ate at the table instead of on the couch, which was the extent of the ceremony. Miguel told her about the limb again, in more detail. Dana told him her sister had called about Thanksgiving and she hadn't called back.

Afterward he washed and she dried, and then they took the wine to the couch and put on the second half of a movie they'd started Tuesday. The cat came and sat between them, which she did most nights.

"Six years," Miguel said, at some point.

"Six years," Dana said. Outside, the rain kept on, and neither of them got up to close the window.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana came home from the clinic with her scrubs damp at the shoulders and her hair sticking to her neck. Miguel was already in the kitchen, sleeves shoved up, arguing quietly with a pan.

"You said seven," she said, dropping her bag by the radiator.

"I said seven so you'd be surprised at six-forty." He tilted his head toward the counter, where two glasses waited beside a bottle of the cheap Malbec they'd been drinking since the first year. "It's the risotto. I keep adding broth and it keeps refusing to become anything."

Dana came over and looked into the pan. "You're stirring like you're afraid of it."

"I am afraid of it."

She took the wooden spoon out of his hand, and he let her, and stood behind her with his chin near her shoulder while she worked the rice against the sides of the pan. Four years ago they had met at a friend's cramped birthday party in Somerville, both of them hiding in the kitchen from a man who wanted to explain cryptocurrency. Every year since, they'd agreed no restaurants, no gifts over twenty dollars. Some years they'd broken the gift rule. Never the restaurant one.

"I got you something," Miguel said.

"Under twenty?"

"Fourteen ninety-nine." He produced a paperback from behind the toaster — the sequel she'd been complaining about waiting for. She laughed, and set the spoon down, and kissed him with one hand still on the pan handle.

Later they ate on the living room floor because the table was covered in her recertification paperwork. The risotto was slightly gluey and they ate all of it. Rain moved across the windows in sheets. Dana talked about a patient's dog; Miguel talked about his sister's move to Denver, and whether they'd ever leave this apartment, and neither of them said the other thing they'd both been thinking about lately, though it sat comfortably between them, unhurried.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana had to reroute her plans. She'd wanted to eat on the fire escape—their fire escape, the one they'd claimed the first summer in the Bushwick apartment—but the metal was slick and the sky had that flat gray look that meant it wasn't going to let up.

Marcus came in at six-fifteen, shaking water off his jacket, and found her arranging candles on the coffee table in a way that suggested she'd rearranged them several times already.

"Fire escape's out," she said.

"Figured." He held up a paper bag, damp at the bottom. "I got the good bread. The place on Knickerbocker."

"You went out of your way."

"It's four blocks."

"In the rain."

He shrugged and went to the kitchen, where the pot of sauce she'd started at five was doing its slow work. He tasted it, added nothing, which she took as the compliment he meant it to be.

They ate on the floor because the table was covered in Dana's grading, and neither of them wanted to move it. Three years. They'd counted from the night of Priya's terrible birthday party, where they'd both hidden in the kitchen and discovered a shared and specific hatred of a certain podcast.

"I have a thing," Marcus said, after. He produced a small flat envelope. Inside was a photograph, printed on real paper: the two of them on the fire escape, taken by a neighbor from across the alley, the shot slightly crooked, Dana laughing at something out of frame.

She looked at it for a long moment. "Deborah took this?"

"She texted it to me in July. I've been sitting on it."

Dana got up, found a nail, and hung it in the hallway where they'd see it every day. Then she came back and sat down beside him, and outside the rain kept going, and neither of them minded.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana got home from the clinic soaking, her scrubs stuck to her back. Ben had already put the water on. He'd been home since two, having traded shifts with Marcus specifically so he wouldn't be walking through the door at eight and ruining everything.

"Three years," Dana said, kicking off her shoes by the radiator. "Three years since you spilled beer on my jacket."

"I bought you a new jacket."

"You bought me a *worse* jacket."

He handed her a mug of tea and went back to the stove. She'd asked for the mushroom pasta, the one from the recipe card his aunt had sent, the one he'd finally stopped burning last winter. Dana leaned against the counter and watched him hesitate over the wine bottle.

"Half a cup," she said. "Then the rest goes in glasses."

"That's what I was thinking."

She went to change, came back in his old sweatshirt, and pulled the small cardboard box out of her bag. Not a ring — they'd talked about that, sort of, in the noncommittal way people talk about things they're not ready to decide. Inside were two keys on a split ring, cut that morning at the hardware store on Ninth.

"For the storage unit," she said. "I put your name on the lease. So if I die, you get my grandmother's dishes and eleven boxes of nursing textbooks."

Ben laughed, then didn't. He turned the keys over in his palm.

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"I know. I workshopped it."

They ate on the couch with plates on their knees because the table was covered in his half-assembled bike wheel. Outside, the rain kept on. Around ten Dana fell asleep against his shoulder, and Ben stayed still, letting the movie run, thinking about grandmother's dishes.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway with her keys still in her hand, listening to the apartment's particular silence—the refrigerator's hum, the radiator ticking, a neighbor's television bleeding through the wall. Four years ago tonight she had sat across from Michael at a Thai place on Dearborn and decided, somewhere between the soup and the check, that she wanted to keep talking to him.

She put the wine in the freezer to chill fast and started chopping garlic.

Michael came in at six-forty, shaking rain off his coat. "You're cooking."

"I'm attempting."

He looked at the counter—the garlic, the shrimp thawing in a bowl, the cookbook propped open with a coffee mug. "I picked up dessert," he said, holding up a white box. "That place on Halsted. The one with the—"

"The chocolate thing."

"The chocolate thing."

They had agreed on no gifts, which they both understood loosely. Dana had bought him socks, good ones, the kind he never bought himself. Michael had a card in his bag that he'd spent twenty minutes choosing and would probably hand over sheepishly at the end of the night.

He took over the shrimp because she always overcooked shrimp. She poured the wine, which was still too warm, and they drank it anyway. The rain got heavier. They ate at the small table by the window with the overhead light off, just the two candles Dana had found in a drawer, mismatched, one of them a leftover from someone's birthday.

"Four years," Michael said.

"Four years." She turned her glass by the stem. "You want to do a fifth?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing." He reached across and put his hand over hers, still holding the glass, and left it there while the rain kept coming down.


Maya got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter and trying to remember what Dev had said about the sauce—something about letting it sit, something about not stirring it too much. Four years ago tonight they'd eaten cold pad thai out of the container on the floor of his old apartment because he hadn't owned a table yet.

She was chopping garlic badly when he came in.

"You're early," he said, setting down a paper bag.

"You're late."

"I'm exactly on time. I went to the place on Grand." He pulled out a bottle of wine, then a smaller bag, which he set behind the toaster without explanation. Maya watched him do it and decided not to ask.

He took over the garlic. She poured the wine into the two mismatched glasses they'd never gotten around to replacing, and they moved around each other in the small kitchen the way they had learned to over three apartments, one bad year, and a cat who had died in March.

"I keep thinking we should do something bigger," Maya said. "Go somewhere."

"We went somewhere. We went to Duluth."

"That was for your cousin's thing."

"It still counts geographically." He tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt. "Do you want to do something bigger?"

She thought about it honestly, which was the only way he ever accepted an answer. "No. I want to eat at the table."

"We have a table now."

"That's what I mean."

They ate slowly. Afterward he retrieved the small bag: a jar of the sour cherry preserves she'd complained about not finding since her grandmother died, tracked down at some Polish deli in Northeast.

Maya turned the jar in her hands and didn't say anything for a moment.

"Four years," Dev said.

"Four years," she agreed, and got two spoons.


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still holding her keys, looking at the counter where they'd stacked the mail for three days, and decided the mail could wait one more.

Six years. Six years since a bad karaoke night in Sacramento, since Dev had sung "Islands in the Stream" alone because his friend bailed, and she'd walked up and taken the second mic without asking.

She put the chicken thighs in the marinade he liked, garlic and lemon and too much pepper. Then she found the string lights in the hall closet, the ones from two apartments ago, and spent twenty minutes untangling them before draping them along the balcony railing.

Dev texted at 5:40: *stuck behind an accident on 50, don't panic, I have the thing.*

*What thing,* she wrote.

*The thing.*

He came in at 6:15 carrying a grocery bag and a small paper sack from the bakery on N Street. "They only had one slice of the tres leches left," he said. "I bribed a woman for it. I gave her my parking spot."

"You didn't."

"I did not. She was already leaving." He kissed the side of her head, then noticed the balcony. "You found them."

"Behind the camping stuff."

They ate outside because the evening had finally cooled off, plates on their knees, the neighbor's TV murmuring through the wall. Dev talked about a coworker's disastrous presentation. Marisol told him about a client who'd cried, then apologized, then cried again about apologizing.

Later, splitting the one slice of cake with two forks, Dev said, "Six years."

"Are you going to ask me something?"

"Not tonight." He scraped up a bit of soaked sponge. "Tonight I just wanted to sit out here with you."

She took the last bite. "Good answer."


Maya got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment holding a grocery bag, considering the sink full of breakfast dishes and the laundry heaped on the armchair, and decided the dishes mattered more.

By the time Devon's key turned in the lock, the kitchen was clean and something was happening on the stove that involved more garlic than strictly necessary.

"You're early," he said.

"I left at four. Told Priya I had a thing."

"Do we have a thing?"

She pointed the wooden spoon at him. "Seven years ago tonight."

Devon set down his backpack. He'd remembered — he'd been thinking about it on the train, in fact, turning over the memory of that terrible bar with the sticky floors where she'd told him his taste in music was embarrassing and then given him her number anyway. But he'd assumed they'd let it pass, the way they'd let his birthday pass in March, both of them too tired from the move.

"I got wine," he said. "It's in the bag. I was going to be casual about it."

"You were going to be casual about it."

"I was going to put it on the counter and see if you noticed."

She laughed. He came over and looked into the pot, and she let him take the spoon, because he was better at the last part, the tasting and adjusting.

They ate on the couch because the table had become a place where mail lived. Devon poured the wine into the two mismatched glasses that had survived four apartments. Outside, a bus sighed at the corner.

"Seven," Maya said.

"Seven."

She tucked her feet under his leg. Neither of them said anything about rings or dates or what came next; there was time, and there was tonight, and the garlic had been exactly enough.


Maya got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment for a second, holding the grocery bag, taking in the particular mess of their life together—Dev's running shoes by the radiator, her library books stacked on the arm of the couch, the plant they'd both forgotten to water and then both overcompensated for, which was somehow still alive.

Three years. She set the bag down and started pulling things out: the good pasta, a lemon, a head of garlic, the bottle of wine she'd overpaid for because the label had a bird on it.

Dev came in at six-forty with flour on his sleeve.

"You went to the bakery," she said.

"I went to the bakery." He held up a white box. "They didn't have the almond thing. I got the other one."

"The one you like."

"The one I like," he admitted. "But you like it second-best, so it's fine."

She laughed and took the box, and he leaned past her to steal a piece of garlic, which he ate raw, which he always did, which she'd stopped finding alarming sometime in year two.

They cooked without much of a plan. He handled the pasta water and she did the sauce, and they collided twice at the stove and once on purpose. Dev put on the playlist they'd made during the first winter, when they'd been snowed in for four days and had learned more about each other than they'd meant to.

"Do you remember what I said to you?" she asked. "That night at the bar?"

"You said my coat was ugly."

"It *was* ugly."

"You kept it," he said. "It's in the closet."

Maya looked at him over the rim of her glass and didn't say anything, because he already knew.

They ate on the floor by the window. The pastry got soggy. Neither of them minded.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of the apartment with her keys still in her hand, taking stock: the sink was empty, the couch cushions were straight, and the light coming through the west window had gone gold and slanted. Four years ago tonight she and Marcus had sat on a curb outside a bar in Cincinnati and agreed, awkwardly, to stop pretending they were just friends.

She put the grocery bags on the counter and started the rice. Marcus texted at 5:40: *Traffic. Ten minutes. Don't do the chicken without me.*

*Wasn't going to*, she wrote back, and then, because it was true, *I don't know what you do to it.*

He came in at 5:55 with his tie loose and a paper bag under one arm. "Okay," he said, "close your eyes."

"That's a bottle. I can see it's a bottle."

"Close them anyway." He set it down and she opened her eyes to a bottle of the cheap Riesling they'd bought the first weekend she stayed over at his old place, the one with the radiator that clanked all night. She laughed hard enough that she had to put a hand on the counter.

"They still make this?"

"Gas station on Fifth. Two ninety-nine." He was already rolling up his sleeves, moving her out of the way of the stove with a hand on her hip.

They ate at the actual table instead of the coffee table. Marcus had gotten better at the chicken. Dana told him about the woman at work who had started bringing a parrot to Zoom meetings; he told her his brother might be moving closer. Neither of them said anything about rings or leases or five years, and neither of them needed to, particularly.

Afterward they did the dishes together, badly, and watched half a movie before falling asleep on the couch.


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel had to change the plan.

He'd wanted to grill the steaks on the little concrete slab behind their apartment, the one the landlord called a patio. Instead he moved everything inside, dragging the cast-iron pan out from under the sink and setting it on the stove to heat while he trimmed the fat.

Nora came home at five-thirty, shaking water off her umbrella in the doorway. "It's biblical out there," she said. "Someone's going to build an ark on Delaney Street."

"I know. No grilling."

"I brought wine." She held up the bottle, a cheap Rioja she'd picked from the shelf at the corner store because it had a bull on the label and they'd once spent an evening arguing about whether bullfighting counted as a sport. "Do you remember this?"

He did. That was four years ago, at Marcus's party, when she'd been holding a plastic cup and telling a stranger he was wrong about something, and Daniel had listened for ten minutes before saying anything at all.

She put the bottle down and started slicing potatoes without being asked, thin, the way he liked them, while he seared the steaks. The kitchen filled with smoke and they had to open the window despite the rain, and cold wet air came in and made the candle she'd lit gutter and go out.

"Very romantic," she said.

"It's atmospheric."

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die. She told him about her sister's engagement, and the fifteen-minute phone call about napkin colors. He told her about the argument at work over the new scheduling software.

"Four years," she said, refilling his glass.

"Four years."

Afterward they washed dishes together, badly, and watched half a movie, and fell asleep on the couch before it ended.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they'd left the breakfast dishes, and decided that dealing with them counted as a gift.

By the time Marcus came in at six-forty, the dishes were done and there was a pan of chicken thighs in the oven, the recipe he'd clipped from somewhere and stuck to the fridge in August and never made.

"You cooked," he said.

"I assembled. There's a difference." She took the paper bag out of his hands and looked inside: a bottle of the cheap Portuguese wine they'd liked in Lisbon, and a smaller bag with a bakery logo.

"Don't shake it."

"I wasn't going to shake it."

He hung his coat on the back of a chair instead of the hook, which she let go, because it was their anniversary — four years since the night they'd stayed up talking in his awful apartment on Weld Street until the sun came up and neither of them had gone to work. They had never quite agreed on whether that was the actual date, but they'd settled on it, the way you settle on a name for a cat.

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had his tax documents on it. Marcus put on a record; Dana made him turn it down twice. The chicken was slightly underdone in the middle, and they ate around that part and laughed about it.

Later, she opened the bakery bag: two éclairs, a little smashed.

"I carried them on the train," he said. "I did my best."

"They're perfect," she said, and meant it, and pressed her sock foot against his ankle while the record spun down toward its quiet, scratching end.


The Fourth of March

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the entryway of the apartment with her keys still in her hand, taking in the particular silence of rooms that had been empty all day, and then she started moving.

By the time Theo's key turned in the lock, she had the kitchen window cracked open to let out the smell of scorched garlic and had rescued most of the shrimp.

"You're cooking," he said, setting down a paper bag.

"I'm attempting. The recipe assumed I own a garlic press."

"You do. It's behind the colander." He was already washing his hands, already reaching past her for the pan, and she let him, the way she'd learned to over four years — not surrender, exactly. Division of labor.

"What's in the bag?"

"Cake. The lemon one from Bergen's. And a bottle of the cheap Portuguese stuff you like."

"It's five dollars, Theo. It's not cheap, it's affordable."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had a laptop and two weeks of mail on it and neither of them wanted to deal with that tonight. Rain started around eight, tapping the fire escape. Theo put on the playlist he'd been building since January, which he'd sworn was for the gym.

"Four years," Dana said. "Do you remember what you said to me? On the walk back from the diner?"

"I said I'd probably be bad at this."

"You said you'd try not to be boring."

"That's worse." He refilled her glass. "I've failed. We just spent twenty minutes discussing the garlic press."

"For eleven minutes of that I was extremely happy," she said.

He laughed. She leaned into his shoulder, and they stayed there while the rain went on, not talking, the cake still in its box on the counter, waiting.


The bus was late, so Dana got home first, which almyou meant she had time to hide the evidence of her failure. The cake had cracked down the middle when she'd turned it out of the pan. She'd tried to spackle it with frosting. It looked like a geological event.

By the time Marcus came through the door, shaking rain off his jacket, she'd covered the whole thing with a dish towel like a body at a crime scene.

"It smells incredible in here," he said.

"It smells like burnt sugar."

"Same thing." He kissed her hair, then noticed the towel. "What's under there?"

"Nothing. A tragedy. Don't look."

He looked. He laughed hard enough that she hit him with the towel, and then he said, honestly, "I would eat that entire thing right now," which was the correct answer, and they agreed to eat it later, after the actual food.

The actual food was his contribution: two ribeyes he'd bought on the way home, a splurge, and a bag of green beans he'd forgotten he was supposed to trim. Dana trimmed them while he heated the cast iron until the kitchen filled with smoke and the smoke detector went off, and he stood on a chair fanning it with a magazine while she opened the window and yelled encouragement.

Three years. They'd met at a wedding neither of them wanted to attend, stationed at the same bad table.

They ate on the couch because the table was covered in his tax documents. She put on the playlist she'd made in the second month of knowing him, the one that was embarrassing now. He didn't say anything about it except, once, "God, this song."

Later, forks straight into the ruined cake, she said, "Next year we should go somewhere."

"We say that every year."

"I know," she said, and leaned into him, and neither of them moved for a while.


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter and trying to remember what they had. Half a bag of arborio rice. A shallot going soft. Two chicken thighs she'd defrosted that morning on a hunch.

Six years. Not a wedding anniversary, nothing official, just the night in a friend's crowded apartment when Dev had asked if she wanted to step out onto the fire escape, and she'd said yes, and neither of them had gone back inside.

He texted at five forty: *stopping at the place on Warren. don't cook.*

She texted back: *already started.*

*ok. then I'm getting the cake.*

*not the coconut one*

*it's the only good one*

*get whatever you want*

He came in at six thirty with a white box, a bottle of wine, and rain in his hair. He set everything down and looked at the stove, where she was standing over the risotto with a wooden spoon, adding stock a ladle at a time.

"You hate making risotto," he said.

"I hate making it badly." She held out the spoon. He tasted it and made a face he'd made for six years, the one that meant *good, but I'm not going to say so immediately*.

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had his laptop and a spread of tax documents on it, and neither of them wanted to move any of it. She put on the record he'd bought her in Philadelphia. He refilled her glass without asking. She told him about the woman at work who'd cried in the supply closet; he told her about the bus driver who had waited for him.

The cake was coconut. She ate a slice anyway.

Later, on the couch, his hand found her ankle. "Six," he said.

"Six," she said, and left it there.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia had to reroute her plans. She'd wanted to walk to the Vietnamese place on Kirby, the one with the plastic stools and the broth that tasted like someone's grandmother had opinions about it. Instead she texted Marcus: *raincheck on pho? literally?*

He wrote back a photo of their kitchen counter — two grocery bags, a bundle of cilantro sticking out like a bouquet.

"You're making it," she said when she got home, shaking water off her jacket.

"I'm attempting it." He had the laptop propped against the toaster, a recipe open, three tabs of conflicting advice. "Apparently you're supposed to char the ginger. Over an open flame. In a rental."

"Six years and you're going to burn the place down."

"Six years," he agreed. He handed her a knife and the onion, because he knew she liked having something to do with her hands.

They worked mostly in silence, which was the thing Delia had stopped apologizing for around year two — that they didn't need to fill it. The window over the sink fogged. Marcus put on the playlist he'd made her when they were still texting like idiots, and neither of them commented on it, though she smiled at the onion.

The broth came out thin. They ate it anyway, on the couch, bowls balanced on knees, and she told him about the woman at work who'd asked if they were ever going to make it official, and how she'd said *we did, we signed a lease*, and how the woman had laughed uncertainly.

"Do you mind?" Marcus asked. "When people ask."

"No." She thought about it. "I mind that they think it's the interesting question."

He nodded slowly, and reached over, and put his cold hand on her ankle, and left it there.


The rain started around four, which meant Danny had to change his plan about grilling. He stood in the kitchen of their second-floor apartment, looking at the two ribeyes he'd bought at the good butcher on Whitman, the one that charged too much and made you feel like you were doing something important.

"Cast iron," Nadia said, coming in with her hair still damp from the walk from the bus stop. "It's better anyway. You get the crust."

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true." She set down a paper bag. "I got the wine. And the terrible cake."

The terrible cake was a running thing—four years ago, on the night they'd decided they were something, they'd shared a slice of grocery-store sheet cake from a coworker's baby shower, stale, with frosting like spackle. Nadia had said it was the best cake she'd ever had, and then had laughed at herself for saying something so absurd, and Danny had thought: oh.

She found the vanilla one with the blue roses. He heated the pan until it smoked and set off the alarm, which he waved down with a dish towel while she opened windows and complained about the smell in her sweaters.

They ate at the little table by the window with the rain going. She told him about a woman at work who'd started bringing a parrot to Zoom calls. He told her he'd finally called about the car.

"Four years," she said.

"Four years." He turned his glass by the stem. "Feels like a normal amount."

"That's romantic."

"I mean it in a good way. Like—it's not remarkable that we're still here. That's the good part."

Nadia considered this, then reached over and took his hand, sticky with frosting, and held it on the table between the plates.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still wearing her coat, taking inventory: the good olive oil, half a box of orzo, two chicken thighs she'd defrosted that morning before her shift. Four years. It didn't feel like four years, except in the way the apartment had accumulated evidence—his running shoes by the door, her books on his side of the bed because his side got better light.

She was browning the chicken when Marcus came in with a paper bag and a look of mild triumph.

"You said no gifts," she said.

"It's not a gift. It's a bottle of wine, which is a household expense." He set it on the counter and leaned over the pan. "That smells illegal."

"Don't touch it."

"I wasn't going to touch it."

He touched it. She smacked his hand with the wooden spoon and he retreated to the small table by the window, clearing off the mail and her charger and the sunglasses that had been sitting there since August. He found the candles in the drawer where they'd been since a power outage two winters ago, wedged them into a pair of juice glasses, and lit them. The effect was less romantic than expected, but he left them.

They ate slowly. Marcus told the story of the night they met, which he told wrong every year, and she corrected him every year, and this had become part of the story.

"You were not wearing a green shirt."

"I have a photograph."

"You have a photograph of a different night."

Later they sat on the floor with the wine because the couch was too far from the record player. He put on the album from that first apartment, the one with the skip in the third track. When it skipped, they both waited for it, and then Dana laughed, and he pulled her closer without saying anything about it.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the good cutting board out that morning like a note to herself.

Four years. Not a wedding anniversary — they'd never gotten around to that conversation in any serious way — but the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when Marcus had walked her back to her apartment after a work thing and neither of them had wanted the walk to end, so they'd gone around the block twice more.

She had the sauce started when he came in, carrying a paper bag that clinked.

"You said no gifts," she said.

"It's not a gift, it's wine. Wine is groceries." He set it down and kissed the side of her head, then looked at the stove. "You're doing the thing with the fennel."

"I'm doing the thing with the fennel."

He washed his hands and started on the salad without being asked, which was, she thought, most of what four years came to. He knew where the colander was. He knew she liked the radishes sliced thin enough to see through.

They ate at the coffee table with the TV off, which was their one rule for the night. Marcus told her about the argument he'd had with his brother. Dana told him she'd been thinking about applying for the position in Denver, and watched his face while she said it, and saw him decide to be careful rather than quick.

"Okay," he said. "Tell me about it."

They talked until the candle Dana had bought in a hurry burned down past the label. Later, doing the dishes together, Marcus bumped her hip with his and she flicked water at him, and neither of them said anything about forever, because it seemed unnecessary and also like a lot to promise on a Tuesday.


Dana got home first and found the apartment exactly as they'd left it that morning—coffee mugs in the sink, one of Theo's socks orphaned by the radiator. She had thirty minutes before he finished his shift at the bike shop, and she'd promised herself she wouldn't do anything elaborate. Four years ago tonight they'd eaten dumplings out of a paper carton on the floor of her old studio, and every anniversary since had tried to honor that: low ceremony, high attention.

She washed the mugs. She put on the record he'd bought her in March, the one with the scratch in the third track that they both pretended not to hear. From the freezer she pulled the good vodka and two glasses, then thought better of the glasses and left them in the cupboard, because he liked to pick them out himself.

Theo came in at seven with his helmet under one arm and a paper bag under the other.

"Don't look," he said.

"I'm looking."

"It's not a surprise, it's just a thing." He set the bag down and produced two containers of dumplings from the place on Grand, the one that had replaced the place they used to go. "They're not the same. I want to say that up front. The wrappers are thicker."

"We'll adjust our expectations."

They ate on the floor because that was the tradition, backs against the couch, containers balanced on their knees. Theo asked whether she'd called the landlord about the window. She had not. He said he would, and she said she knew he would, and neither of them said anything about the lease renewal sitting on the counter, or the question that came with it, which they had agreed months ago to leave alone until spring.

The record hit the scratch. Dana reached over and turned it up.


The rain started around four, which meant Dana's plan to grill was finished before it began.

"We could still do it," Marcus said, standing at the sliding door with a spatula in his hand, looking out at the small concrete patio behind their duplex. "I'll hold an umbrella."

"You'll electrocute yourself."

"Charcoal doesn't conduct electricity."

"Marcus."

He turned around, grinning, and set the spatula on the counter. "Fine. Cast iron?"

They had been together three years, which they counted from a Tuesday in October when Dana had agreed to get a beer with him after their shift at the restaurant where they'd both worked then. Neither of them worked there now. She did payroll for a landscaping company; he taught eighth grade science and coached JV soccer, badly, by his own admission.

Dana got the pan hot while Marcus salted the steaks, two ribeyes he'd bought that morning at the good butcher on Fremont instead of the grocery store, which she'd noticed and hadn't mentioned. The kitchen filled with smoke. He opened a window and the rain sound came in with the cold.

"Do you want to do the thing where we say what we're grateful for?" she asked.

"We did that last year and you cried."

"I had a lot going on last year."

"I liked it," he said. "We can do it."

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become where the mail lived. Marcus had made a playlist, mostly songs from the restaurant's kitchen radio, and Dana had bought a cheap bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a box of cannoli from the Italian place. She put a candle in one of them.

"That's a birthday thing," he said.

"It's a candle thing."

He blew it out anyway. Later they argued mildly about whether to watch a movie, decided against it, and sat instead listening to the rain, her feet in his lap, the dishes waiting.


Marisol got home first, which meant she had twenty minutes before Devin's bus turned onto Ashland. She'd planned this badly and knew it — the good pan was still soaking in the sink from Tuesday's failed attempt at something ambitious, and the candles she'd bought were the wrong kind, the tall tapered sort that belonged in a movie about a different couple. She lit them anyway and set them on the crate they still used as a coffee table, four years into the apartment, three years into each other.

Devin came in shaking rain off his jacket. "I got the wine," he said. "I also got the wrong wine. They didn't have the one you like, so I asked a guy, and he had opinions."

"Was he right?"

"He was confident."

They cooked together, which was the actual tradition, the thing neither of them had ever proposed out loud. Devin handled the onions because Marisol's eyes were useless against them; Marisol handled the timing because Devin's sense of it was aspirational. He put on the playlist he'd made in the first year, back when he was still trying to impress her, and she made fun of two songs and let the rest go.

"Three years," she said, over the pasta. "Do you remember what you said to me that night, at Ellie's thing?"

"I said something about the Cubs."

"You said, 'I don't actually like parties, but I'd stay at this one.'"

He winced. "That's terrible."

"It worked."

Later they sat on the floor with the wine, which was fine, actually, and the rain kept up against the window. Neither of them brought up the other conversation, the one about rings and paperwork and what her mother kept asking. It could wait. It had waited three years and the evening was too good to spend on the future.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, calculating: forty minutes before Theo's train, and the sauce needed at least that long to reduce.

She had the onions going when he texted a photo of the platform sign — *DELAYED 15 MIN* — followed by *don't panic.*

*not panicking,* she wrote back, and then turned the burner down anyway.

Three years. It surprised her that she remembered the date at all, since the beginning had been so unofficial — a Tuesday, a bar on Cortland with terrible lighting, a conversation that ran until the bartender started stacking chairs. Neither of them had called it anything for months afterward. But Theo had written the date in his phone calendar, and now it recurred annually, and now they cooked.

He came in at 7:40 with a paper bag and cold hands. "The bread guy was closing. I begged."

"Did it work?"

He held up a baguette, slightly crushed at one end. "Partially."

She let him take over the sauce, which was his recipe anyway, and she opened the wine — a Chianti they'd bought in September with no occasion attached, saving it the way people save things. Theo tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt, made a better face.

They ate at the coffee table because the actual table had become a repository for his sister's wedding invitations, which they were addressing as a favor and resenting quietly. Dana pushed a stack aside with her foot.

"Do you want to do the thing?" Theo asked.

The thing was: each of them named one moment from the year. She always found it slightly embarrassing and always did it.

"You go first," she said.

He thought about it longer than she expected. Outside, someone's car alarm started and stopped.

"August," he said. "When your mom was in the hospital. You called me from the parking garage."

Dana set down her fork. "That's a terrible moment."

"You called me, though."

She looked at him. "Yeah," she said. "I did."


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, taking inventory: the good pan, the bag of arborio rice she'd bought on the way home, a bottle of wine that had cost more than she usually allowed herself. Four years. Four years since the night they'd sat on the fire escape of her old apartment in Somerville and admitted they'd both been waiting for the other one to say something.

Ben came in at six-forty, snow on his shoulders, holding a paper bag against his chest like a football.

"You're cooking," he said, delighted and suspicious.

"I'm attempting."

"Because I brought food." He set the bag down. "From the Portuguese place. The one with the sad lighting."

"The one where the waiter always asks if we're on our honeymoon."

"That's the one." He was already unbuttoning his cuffs, already reaching past her for the corkscrew, moving through the small kitchen with the ease of a man who had learned exactly where everything was. "We can do both. Rice tomorrow. Tonight we eat like people who don't have jobs."

They ate on the floor of the living room because the coffee table was the right height and the dining chairs were not. Dana put on the playlist she'd been building all week, a joke about their taste in music and also not a joke. Ben told her about the argument he'd had with his brother; she told him about the woman at work who kept saying *synergize*.

Around ten he leaned back against the couch and said, "So. Four years."

"Four years."

"You ever think about—" He stopped, made a vague gesture that could have meant marriage or could have meant the rest of everything.

"Sometimes," Dana said. "Not tonight."

"No," he agreed, and refilled her glass. "Not tonight."


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter: two bags of groceries, a bottle of red she'd overpaid for at the place on Delancey, and the small dent in the linoleum where Theo had dropped a cast iron pan last February.

Four years. Not a wedding anniversary, nothing anybody sent cards for, but they'd agreed early on that October ninth counted.

She was searing the chicken thighs when he came in, hair damp from the rain, holding a paper sleeve of flowers that had clearly been rescued from a bodega bucket.

"They were the last ones," Theo said. "I'm choosing to find that romantic."

"Scarcity increases value."

"That's what I said to the guy." He kissed the back of her neck, then went to change out of his work clothes, and she heard him talking to the cat through the wall.

They ate at the coffee table because the actual table had become a repository for mail and a half-built bookshelf. Theo poured the wine badly, sloshing some onto the coaster she'd bought precisely for that reason.

"Okay," he said. "The tradition."

"You go first."

He thought about it. "Best thing this year — when your mom finally called me by my name instead of 'your friend.'"

Marisol laughed so hard she had to set down her glass. "She's coming around. Give her a decade."

"And you?"

She considered lying, saying something soft. Instead: "The night the power went out in August and we played gin rummy for six hours and you cheated."

"I did not cheat."

"You absolutely cheated."

Later they watched half a movie neither of them followed and fell asleep on the couch, the cat wedged between them, the flowers already drooping in a water glass on the windowsill.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, doing math: two hours until Marcus finished his shift, one pot of water, the good olive oil somewhere behind the peanut butter.

Four years. Four years since a bad karaoke bar in Bloomington and a conversation that had gone until three in the morning.

She had the sauce simmering when he texted: *pharmacy line out the door, might be 7:30.* She wrote back *fine* and then, because *fine* looked cold on the screen, added *I'm not starting without you.*

He came in at 7:41 with a grocery bag and rain on his shoulders. "They were out of the cake you like," he said. "I got the lemon one. It looked less sad."

"Lemon's good."

"Also I got candles, but they're birthday candles, so."

"So we'll pretend the relationship is turning four." She took the bag from him. He kissed the side of her head and went to change out of his work clothes, and she heard him talking to the cat through the wall.

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. He told her about a woman who'd tried to argue him down on the price of insulin, and how he'd stood there wanting to explain that he was twenty-six and did not set the prices of anything.

"You want to hear something," Dana said. "My mother asked me again."

Marcus set down his fork. "And?"

"I said we're happy."

"We are."

"That's what I said."

He looked at her for a second longer than the conversation required, then reached over and refilled her glass. Later they watched half of a movie neither of them had chosen carefully, and she fell asleep against his arm before the lemon cake was cut.


The rain started around four, which meant Daniel's plan to grill was finished. He stood at the kitchen window of their apartment in Providence, watching water sheet down the fire escape, and considered his options.

"We could order from that Thai place," Nora said, coming in with her hair still damp from the walk from the bus stop. She dropped her bag by the door and kicked off her shoes, which was a thing she did that he'd stopped minding sometime in year two.

"I bought steaks."

"Cast iron them, then." She was already looking in the cabinet for the pan. "Three years and you still act like the broiler is a rumor."

Daniel took the pan from her and set it on the stove. She got the wine, a bottle they'd been saving since a trip to the Finger Lakes in August, and the corkscrew that only worked if you held it at an angle. The steaks hissed. Nora chopped a shallot badly and he didn't say anything about it.

They ate on the couch because the table had become a place where mail lived. Nora had brought home a small chocolate cake from the bakery near her office, and it sat in its white box on the coffee table, sweating slightly.

"Do you remember what I wore?" she asked.

"The green thing. With the buttons."

"It was blue."

"It was green in the bar light."

She let it go. Outside, a car alarm went off and then stopped. Daniel refilled her glass and she pulled her feet up under her, and they talked about her sister's divorce, and about whether they could afford a place with a second bedroom in the spring, and eventually about nothing much at all, until the cake was mostly gone and the rain had softened to something you had to listen for.


The rain started around four, which meant Diane's plan to grill on the balcony was finished before she got home from the clinic. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her hair dripping and announced this like a death in the family.

"So we improvise," Marcus said. He had already changed out of his work clothes and was doing something ambitious with a cast-iron skillet. "Chicken thighs. Indoors. Nobody has to know."

"Six years and you're pan-searing."

"Six years and you married a man who can pan-sear." He caught himself. "Figuratively."

Diane laughed and went to change. When she came back in a sweatshirt and the wool socks he'd given her two Christmases ago, she found the good plates out—the ones from his grandmother that lived on the top shelf and came down maybe three times a year. She set the table while he worked. There was a bottle of Malbec breathing on the counter, which meant he'd stopped at the place on Halsted, which meant he'd left work early.

"I got you something stupid," she said.

"How stupid?"

She handed him a small box. Inside was a keychain shaped like a tiny bicycle, because his had been stolen in April and he still complained about it weekly. He turned it over in his palm for a long moment.

"This is the least stupid thing anyone has given me."

"It's a two-dollar keychain, Marcus."

"I'm aware." He kissed her temple and went back to the stove.

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt formal enough to count. Afterward they argued mildly about whether their anniversary should be the night of the party or the following Tuesday, when he'd actually called her. Then they put on the show they were three seasons behind on, and the rain kept going, and neither of them got up to close the window.


The rain started around four, which meant their plan to eat on the balcony was finished. Dana stood at the sliding door with a dish towel over her shoulder, watching water pool in the seat of the folding chair they'd bought at a yard sale in Sacramento.

"We could put a tarp up," Miguel said from the kitchen.

"We could eat inside like people with sense."

He came over and looked out with her. Four years ago tonight they'd been at a work party neither of them wanted to attend, standing near the drinks table, and she had said something unkind about the host's shoes, and he had laughed harder than the joke deserved. That was the whole beginning. They still argued about who spoke first.

They moved the candles to the coffee table instead. Miguel had made the mushroom thing he made, the one that took two hours and dirtied every pan in the apartment, and Dana had picked up a bottle of wine and a small chocolate cake from the bakery on Twelfth, and neither of them had bought a card, because they'd agreed years ago that cards were a scam.

"Sit down," she said. "You've been standing since noon."

"I'm plating."

"You're hovering over the plating."

They ate on the floor with their backs against the couch, the TV off, the rain steady on the windows. He told her about his sister's new job. She told him she'd finally emailed the woman about the ceramics class. Around nine they got out the shoebox of photos they never got around to organizing, and they laughed at his haircut from 2021, and Dana found the receipt from their first real dinner out and read the total aloud in disbelief.

Later, doing dishes side by side, he flicked water at her. She said his name like a warning and didn't mean it.

The cake sat half-eaten on the counter until morning.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they'd left the breakfast dishes, and decided that washing them counted as a gesture.

By the time Marcus came through the door at six-forty, she had the sink emptied and a pot of water heating.

"Four years," he said, holding up a paper bag. "I got the bread from the place on Cedar. They were out of the sourdough, so it's the olive one."

"I like the olive one."

"You tolerate the olive one."

She took the bag from him and set it down, then put her hands flat against his chest, which was cold from outside. "How was the meeting?"

"Long. Pointless. I thought about you being annoyed on my behalf and it got me through."

They cooked together badly, the way they always did, negotiating for space at the stove. Marcus wanted the pasta water saltier. Dana said he'd been reading too many food blogs. He conceded, then salted it again when she turned around, and she saw him do it in the reflection of the window and let it go.

They ate at the small table with the wobbling leg. Marcus had brought home a bottle of wine that cost eleven dollars, and they agreed it was better than a bottle they'd had in September that cost thirty.

"Do you remember what you said, that first night?" Dana asked. "At the bus stop?"

"I said I'd call you."

"You said you'd probably call me."

"I was managing expectations."

"You called me the next morning. At seven-fifteen."

"I have never," Marcus said, "been good at managing expectations."

Afterward they moved to the couch. Dana put her feet in his lap and he held them absently, thumb working at her arch, while they argued about what to watch and then watched nothing at all.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they'd stacked mail for three weeks, and decided that was the gift: clearing it. Bills into one pile, catalogs into the recycling, a save-the-date from Marcus and Priya that she propped against the sugar jar.

Eli came in at six-forty with a paper bag from the Italian place on Cortelyou and a bunch of ranunculus wrapped in newsprint. "They were out of the good ones," he said. "These are the sad off-brand ones."

"They're orange. You know I like orange."

"I know. That's why I got the sad ones."

They'd agreed: no restaurant, no gifts over twenty dollars. Four years since the night at Ana's birthday party when they'd stayed on the fire escape until three in the morning talking about their fathers. They'd both agreed that counted as the start, though Eli maintained the real start was six days later, in the laundromat.

He found a candle in the drawer of miscellany and lit it. Dana put on the record they'd bought at a stoop sale in Ditmas Park, the one with the skip in track four they'd stopped noticing. They ate on the couch because the table was small and pushed against the wall and neither of them had ever moved it.

"Do you want the last of the bread?" she asked.

"Split it."

Around nine her sister called and Dana let it go to voicemail, which felt like a small act of devotion. Eli fell asleep before the record ended, his head against the arm of the couch, one hand still resting on her knee. She sat there a while longer, listening to the skip, then woke him gently and they went to bed.


The rain started around four, which Dana took as a good sign. Weather like this made the apartment feel smaller in the way she liked, the windows fogging, the radiator clanking its uneven rhythm.

Miles got home at five-forty with a paper bag from the Italian place on Third and his hair flattened to his forehead. "They were out of the mushroom ravioli," he said, shaking off his jacket. "I got the butternut squash. I know you have opinions about squash."

"I have one opinion about squash."

"Which you've shared."

"I'll eat it." She had the table cleared already, which took effort—it had been holding her laptop, a stack of unopened mail, and a half-finished puzzle since October. She'd found the candles in the box under the bed, the ones from their old place in Bakersfield, stubs now, but they'd burn.

Three years. They'd argued mildly, a week ago, about which day counted: the night of the party where they'd talked until two in the morning on somebody's back steps, or the following Thursday when he'd actually asked her out. They'd settled on the party. It seemed more honest.

Miles plated the food while Dana put on the record he'd given her last Christmas, the one neither of them had gotten around to playing much. He poured wine into the two glasses that matched.

"I have something," she said, "but it's stupid."

"Good. I have something and it's also stupid."

Hers was a photograph she'd found in a box, printed at a drugstore kiosk—the two of them at the party, caught accidentally in the background of someone else's picture. His was a key ring shaped like a squash.

They ate slowly. The rain kept up. Around nine, Dana put her feet in his lap and they finished the puzzle, arguing companionably about where the sky went.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the good cutting board that morning, and decided she was going to actually do it this time — make the mushroom thing from the cookbook Theo's sister had given them, the one with the cracked spine they never opened.

Three years. It seemed both enormous and like nothing at all. Three years ago they'd been sitting on a curb outside a bar on Cherokee Street, and she'd said something about how she didn't want to date anyone, and he'd said okay, and then neither of them had left.

Theo came in at six-forty with a bottle of wine and a paper bag of bread that was clearly still warm.

"You cooked," he said, delighted and a little suspicious.

"I'm cooking. Present tense. It's going badly."

He set down the bag and looked over her shoulder. The mushrooms had released more water than the recipe seemed to anticipate; the pan was a small gray swamp.

"Turn the heat up," he said. "Let it boil off."

"That's your answer to everything."

"It works for most things."

It did work, eventually. They ate at the coffee table because the actual table had become a repository for mail and a bicycle wheel. Theo poured the wine into a mug for himself because there was only one clean glass and he gave it to her without commenting on it.

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

It was a keychain shaped like a tiny cast-iron skillet, because he'd broken his last one in June and complained about it for a week.

He held it in his palm for a moment. "This is not stupid."

"It's a little stupid."

"It's a little stupid," he agreed, and put it in his pocket.


Nadia got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the doorway of their apartment with her keys still in her hand, looking at the living room like a stranger might: the sagging blue couch they'd bought off a stoop in Somerville, the plant she kept nearly killing, the stack of Dev's library books on the radiator. Four years. It seemed like both a long time and nothing at all.

She put the wine in the freezer to chill fast and started chopping garlic. Dev came in at six-thirty, hair damp from the rain, carrying a paper bag that he set on the counter with exaggerated care.

"Don't look."

"I'm not looking."

"You're looking."

"I'm cooking," she said, and looked. It was a small white box from the Portuguese bakery two neighborhoods over, the one that made the custard tarts she'd talked about for a week after they'd gone in September.

"You took the bus in the rain for those."

"I took two buses." He kissed the back of her neck and reached around her to steal a slice of pepper. "How's the sauce?"

"Needs twenty minutes. Set the table?"

He did, and then he found the candles she'd forgotten they owned in the drawer with the batteries and the extra phone chargers, and lit them with the long lighter from the grill. They ate at the table instead of on the couch, which felt formal in a way that made them both a little shy, and then a little silly, and then they were laughing about the terrible first date — the wrong bar, the forty minutes she'd waited, the apology text with three typos.

Later they did the dishes together, him washing, her drying, the rain still going.

"Same time next year," Dev said.

"Same time next year," she said, and put the last plate away.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where they usually dumped mail and keys, and decided to clear it. Four years. It seemed like a number that deserved a cleared counter.

She put the chicken in at five-fifteen and texted Marcus: *don't stop for anything, I already got wine.*

He stopped anyway. Not for wine — for the small bakery on Third that closed at six, where he bought two slices of the almond cake she'd mentioned once in February and then never again. He'd remembered because he'd written it down in his phone under a note titled "ideas," which contained nine items, six of them useless.

"You're wet," she said when he came in.

"It's raining sideways." He set the bakery box down and shook out his jacket. "You cleaned."

"I moved things."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt formal enough to be funny. Marcus had lit a candle that turned out to be pumpkin-scented, left over from October, and the smell fought with the rosemary until Dana blew it out and they both laughed.

"Do you remember what we did that first night?" she asked.

"We watched half of a documentary about volcanoes."

"You were so nervous."

"I was not nervous. I was hot. Your radiator was broken."

Afterward they carried the cake to the living room and put on the volcano documentary, the same one, and got twenty minutes in before Dana muted it and asked what he thought about the apartment on Delancey, the one with the second bedroom. Marcus said he'd been thinking about it too. They talked about rent, and whether they'd need a car, and how her mother would react, and eventually the cake was gone and the rain had stopped and neither of them had turned the sound back on.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. The bus had come early, the grocery store had been mercifully empty, and now she stood in the kitchen of their apartment with two bags of ingredients and forty minutes before Theo's shift ended.

Six years. Not a wedding anniversary — they'd stopped fielding questions about that around year three — but the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when Theo had asked, in the parking lot of a laundromat, whether she'd want to do this on purpose.

She started the sauce. She had a plan involving candles, but she'd left the candles at the store, so the plan became a table lamp turned to face the wall, which was, she decided, basically ambience.

Theo texted: *running 15 late, sorry. bringing something.*

He came in at seven with rain on his jacket and a paper bag from the bakery on Delaney, the one that closed at six. "I begged," he said. "I stood there and I begged a nineteen-year-old for a chocolate cake and she took pity on me."

"You smell like rain."

"That's a compliment?"

"It's an observation." She kissed him anyway, one hand still holding the wooden spoon.

They ate at the table with the lamp facing the wall. Theo asked about the paperwork she'd been dreading; she asked about his coworker's custody situation. Between them the conversation moved the way it did now, easily, without much need for punctuation.

"I got you something," Theo said afterward, and produced a small flat box. Inside was a keychain, a brass rectangle stamped with the laundromat's address.

Dana laughed and then didn't. "That's very good," she said. "That's annoyingly good. I got you socks."

"I need socks."

"You do need socks."

They ate the cake standing up in the kitchen, sharing one fork, the rain going steadily against the window.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She toed off her boots by the door and stood in the quiet kitchen, considering the counter: three days of mail, a bowl with two bananas gone spotty, the receipt from the hardware store still curled where Marcus had left it Sunday.

Six years. Not a wedding date, nothing anybody else would circle. Just the night they'd sat on the concrete steps outside her old apartment in Cleveland Heights until two in the morning, and she'd finally said the thing she'd been not-saying for a month.

She cleared the counter. Put the water on for pasta, because they'd agreed—texted about it that morning, actually, a little negotiation between meetings—no restaurant, no reservation, no waiting forty minutes for a table on a Thursday.

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

"There's a thing about the bread," he said.

"What kind of thing."

"They were out of the good one. So I got the other one. And then I felt bad about it, so." He set a small bunch of ranunculus on the table, the pink-orange kind she liked, wrapped in damp newspaper.

"You didn't have to."

"I know. That's sort of the point of it."

She let him take over the sauce, because he was better at it and both of them knew it. She sliced the not-good bread. He asked about her sister; she asked whether he'd heard back about the interview, and he hadn't, and they let that sit for a minute without making it into anything.

They ate at the table instead of on the couch. Afterward Marcus put on the record that had been playing that first night, mostly as a joke, and it was a joke, and it also wasn't. Dana leaned back in her chair.

"Six," she said.

"Six," he agreed, and started the dishes.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. The bus had been early, and the pharmacy where she worked had let her cut out at four because the register system went down. She stood in the kitchen of their apartment holding her keys, recalculating.

The plan had been simple: takeout from the Vietnamese place on Ellis, the good bottle of wine they'd been saving since Christmas, and the couch. Four years. Not a wedding anniversary — they didn't have one of those, and Dana had stopped explaining that to her mother — but the anniversary of the night Marcus had walked her home from a mutual friend's cramped birthday party and neither of them had wanted the walk to end.

She decided to cook instead. It was a small betrayal of the plan, but she had time and the fridge had chicken thighs.

Marcus texted at five: *stuck at the shop, one more brake job, sorry.* Then, a minute later: *don't order yet.*

*Not ordering,* she wrote back. *Come hungry.*

He came in at six-forty smelling like solvent and cold air, and stopped in the doorway when he registered the smell of garlic. "You cooked."

"You're surprised."

"I'm suspicious." He kissed the side of her head, then held up a paper bag. "I got the spring rolls anyway. Insurance."

They ate at the small table, which they mostly used for mail. Marcus opened the wine and poured too much into Dana's glass, the way he always did. She told him about the register system. He told her about a customer who insisted the noise was coming from the engine and not, as it turned out, from a plastic bag caught under the car.

"Four years," he said.

"Feels shorter."

"Feels right," he said, and refilled his own glass, and after a while they left the dishes and moved to the couch.


The rain started around four, which meant Delia came home from the clinic with her hair plastered flat and her scrubs damp at the shoulders. Nate was already in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up, standing over a pot of something that smelled like garlic and burnt butter.

"Don't panic," he said. "The butter was intentional."

"It absolutely was not."

"It's browned. It's a technique." He held up the wooden spoon like evidence.

She kissed him on the jaw, which was the only clean part of him, and went to change. When she came back in sweatpants and one of his old flannel shirts, he had moved the pot off the heat and was scraping the pan with a spatula, frowning.

"Three years," he said.

"Three years since you spilled beer on me at Marcy's thing."

"Two years and eleven months since I apologized properly."

Delia found the wine in the back of the cupboard where they'd hidden it from themselves in January, when they were both trying to be disciplined about money and about drinking and about a lot of things that hadn't stuck. She opened it with the corkscrew that only worked if you held it at an angle.

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had become a place where mail went to die. She'd made a playlist of songs from the year they met, and it was worse than she remembered, and they let it play anyway. Nate told a long story about a coworker's disastrous fantasy football trade. Delia told him about a four-year-old who had named every one of his stitches.

Around nine she put her feet in his lap and he pressed his thumb into her arch without being asked.

"We should do something real next year," he said. "Somewhere with a beach."

"Sure," she said, meaning maybe, meaning this.

Outside, the rain kept going. Neither of them got up to close the window.


The rain started around four, which Dana took as a sign they'd made the right call. No restaurant reservation, no drive across town in traffic — just the apartment, the good pan, and the bottle of wine they'd been saving since Nick's sister brought it back from Sonoma in March.

"Six years," Nick said, dumping shallots onto the cutting board. "That's longer than I lived in Chicago."

"That's longer than my parents' first marriage." Dana was on the floor by the bookshelf, untangling a string of café lights she'd bought on sale in July and never hung. "Do you remember what we did for the first one?"

"Bowling. You wore that sweater with the hole in the sleeve."

"I still have that sweater."

"I know. It has more holes now."

She got the lights strung along the window frame, plugged them in, and stood back. Half the strand didn't work. She left it anyway; it looked deliberate enough in the dark. Outside, brake lights smeared red across the wet street.

Nick had learned to make the mushroom thing from a video, and it mostly worked, though he over-salted the pasta water and Dana pretended not to notice. She poured the wine into the mismatched glasses — the nice ones had gone to a party at Marisol's and never come back. They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had bills on it and neither of them wanted to move the bills.

"I got you something," Dana said. "It's stupid."

It was a bowling pin, keychain-sized, ordered from a novelty site. Nick laughed for a long time.

"I got you nothing," he said. "I thought we said no gifts."

"We did. I broke the rule."

"Then next year I'll break it worse."

She leaned into his shoulder. The rain kept on, and neither of them got up for a while.


Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter: a bag of shallots, a bottle of wine she'd overpaid for, the paper-wrapped fish she'd been assured was fresh that morning. Three years. Not a wedding anniversary — the anniversary of a Tuesday in October when Marcus had walked her to the train and then, instead of leaving, gotten on it with her.

She'd started the risotto when the door opened.

"You're cooking," Marcus said, suspicious.

"I'm attempting."

He set down a grocery bag and looked into her pot. "That's a lot of liquid."

"I'm adding it gradually, like the internet said."

"You dumped it."

"I gradually dumped it." She handed him the spoon. "Fix it. What's in the bag?"

He pulled out a small cake in a plastic clamshell, the kind from the bakery counter with too much frosting. "I panicked at the store. Also, this." A flat square, badly wrapped in newspaper.

She unwrapped it while he stirred. It was a framed photo, printed from her phone: the two of them on the fire escape of the old apartment, her holding a beer, him mid-sentence with his eyes closed.

"That's a terrible picture of you," she said.

"It's a great picture of you."

They ate at the coffee table because the kitchen table had a jigsaw puzzle on it that neither of them wanted to admit they'd abandoned. The risotto was salvageable. The fish was good. The wine was fine, maybe not worth what she paid.

Marcus put his feet up. "Do you ever think about the—"

"Sometimes."

"I wasn't going to say it."

"I know." She leaned against his shoulder. "Not tonight."

"Not tonight," he agreed, and cut into the cake with the wrong fork, and she let him.


Dana got home first, which meant she got to hide the good scissors before Mateo could use them on packing tape. Four years ago tonight they'd sat on the curb outside a bar in Providence arguing about whether a hot dog was a sandwich, and somehow that had turned into a lease, a cat, and a shared understanding that neither of them wanted a wedding, thanks.

"I bought the wrong pasta," Mateo announced, coming through the door with two grocery bags and rain in his hair. "They were out of the bucatini. I got linguine and I'm not sorry."

"You should be a little sorry."

"I'm a little sorry."

They worked around each other in the narrow kitchen the way they'd learned to over three apartments — Dana at the stove, Mateo at the counter, both of them stepping sideways without looking. He'd promised no gifts. He'd bought a gift anyway, a small thing wrapped in the comics page, and set it by her water glass while her back was turned.

"That's cheating," she said.

"It's four dollars. It's not even a real present."

It was a refrigerator magnet shaped like a hot dog. She laughed so hard she had to put down the spoon.

Dana's contribution was the record player, which she'd hauled up from the basement storage unit and cleaned with a dish towel. They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die, and the cat sat on the arm of the couch, judging.

Around ten, Mateo said, "Same time next year?"

"I'll pencil you in."

He put his feet up on the table, which she hated, and she let him, which he noticed. Outside, the rain kept going. Neither of them got up to close the window.