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

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

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

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

"They're romantic," she said.

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

"You said no presents."

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

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

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

"You defended it for forty-five minutes."

"I still would."

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


The Fourth of March

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

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

"You cooked," he said.

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

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

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

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

"You remembered the label," she said.

"I remembered the headache."

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

"She wants a wedding," he said.

"She wants a reason to buy a hat."

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


The forecast promised rain, which suited them fine.

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

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

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

"What's in the bag?"

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

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

"You remembered the gelato."

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"I am aware of the scallops' situation."

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

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

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

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

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

"And then?"

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

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


The Sixth of October

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

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

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

*Last year I had strep.*

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

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

"That's a gift."

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

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

"So it's a threat."

"It's an offer."

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

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


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

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

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

"You cooked," he said.

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

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

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

"Cannoli. From the place on Wexford."

"You drove to Wexford."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Agree to disagree."

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


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

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

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

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

"You cooked," he said.

"You bought something."

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"That was a bonding experience."

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

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

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

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

"Someday. Not tonight."

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

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


The Third of October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did.


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

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

"Five, as of today."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed. "You will not."

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


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

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

"In the rain?"

"You have an umbrella."

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

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

"I bought steaks."

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

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

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

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

"Quiet doesn't mean cheap."

"It kind of does."

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

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

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

"You asked."

"I was being polite."

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


The Fourth of March

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

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

"Seven years," he said.

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

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

"It's the same label."

"It's a different vintage."

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

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

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

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

"Do you want to?"

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

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

"You planned this whole thing days ago."

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

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


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

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

"Three years and we get delivery pizza."

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

"A thing."

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

"You're early," she said.

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

"I got the butter that was there."

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

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

"Stop."

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

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

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

"Same thing next year?" he said.

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


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

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

He wrote back: *since when do you cook*

*since tonight*

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

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

"That still works."

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

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

"You said it. I just stood there."

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

Micah laughed. "I was terrified."

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're a decent man."

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

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

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

"I said it had potential."

"You said it smelled like a hamster."

"It did smell like a hamster."

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


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

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

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

"I'm literally looking at you."

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

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

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

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

"You went to the reservoir," she said.

"Tuesday. On my lunch."

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


The Fourth of December

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tell her we're discussing it."

"We're not discussing it."

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

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

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

"Same thing next year?" he said.

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


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

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

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

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

"I cleared. There's a difference."

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

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

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

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

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


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

He wrote back: *too late.*

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

"You said you had it," he said.

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

"Then I've saved us."

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

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

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

"It's a very small fish."

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

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

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


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

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

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

"You said you were working late."

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

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

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

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

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

"Three years," he said.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"You said no gifts," Delia said.

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

"For what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I had a toothbrush in my bag."

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

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


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

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

She was chopping shallots when he came through the door.

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

"Your plan is the same as my plan."

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

"The lemon one?"

"Obviously the lemon one."

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

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

"Same thing next year?" she said.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's fall."

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

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

"You kept the receipt," he said.

"I did not."

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

She refilled his glass rather than answer.

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


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

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

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

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

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

"A hundred and forty a person."

"It's seven years."

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

She looked at him. "In October?"

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

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

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

"You hated that radiator."

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

"I'll bring the cast iron."

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

"I know."

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

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

That surprised him. "Like Ocean City?"

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

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

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

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

"Three days."

"Three days is a lot for us."

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

"That one."

"It's four hundred more."

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

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

"Not bad," she agreed.


The Tenth of May

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's not all foam."

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

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

"The one you fell asleep during."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll bring the camp stove."

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

"That was one time."

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You wanted foam."

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

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


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

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

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

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

"What'd you say?"

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

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

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

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

"Nobody should eat foam."

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

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

"We'd leave early."

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

"We'd come back Sunday."

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

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

"That's fine."

"It's the murder one."

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


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

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

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

"So you kept it."

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

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

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

"It's not."

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

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

Marisol leaned against the fridge. "Define bad."

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

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

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

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


The Fifth of October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marcus made a face before he could stop himself.

"I know."

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

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

He laughed. "To the taqueria."

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

"That's four hours round trip."

"Five, with traffic." She waited.

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

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

"I already asked Denise to cover the afternoon."

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

"I was going to ask nicely first."

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


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

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

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

"You hated that apartment."

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

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

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

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

"Say it."

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

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

"My back never did recover."

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

"Your phone lost us in Rhinebeck."

"My phone found us in Rhinebeck. Eventually."

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

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

"I was thinking the same thing."


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

"Look what survived," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's a Tuesday-night dinner."

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

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

"That story isn't about the calzone."

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

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


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

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

"You kept it," she said.

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

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

"So," he said. "Friday."

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

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

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

"The salmon thing takes four hours."

"We have four hours."

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

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

"Do you want a grand gesture?"

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

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


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

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

"We own cloth napkins?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The good one?"

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

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


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

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

"That's what we did last year."

"Because it's good."

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

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

"Your sister asks that about every Tuesday."

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

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

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

"Where I got stung by a jellyfish."

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

"There was a jellyfish."

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

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

"That's the appeal."

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

"Nine years," he said.

"Nine years."

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Chester," he said.

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

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

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

"That feels lazy."

"It feels accurate."

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

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

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

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


The Tenth of March

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

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

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

"You stole half of it."

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

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

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

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

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

She flicked the receipt at him. He caught it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"It worked."

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

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

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

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

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

"That's the tradition, though."

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

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

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

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


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

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

"Saturday," he agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

"What thing?"

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

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

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

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

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

"It does take six hours."

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

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

"I have my moments."

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You hate everything I suggest."

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

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

"With the good plates."

"We have good plates?"

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

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


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

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

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

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

"That was a good documentary."

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

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

"What about the barbecue?" Theo said.

"Whose barbecue?"

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

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

"I have moments."

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

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

"Ten years," she said.

"You want to do this again next year?"

"The barbecue?"

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What'd you say?"

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

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

"To South Dakota?"

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

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

"So we come back Friday."

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

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

"I remember the green sign."

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

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


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

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

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

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

"I'm not litigating the server migration."

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

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

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

"So call."

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

"I have one voice."

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

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

"Eight fifteen," she said.

"That's practically midnight."

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

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

"Your cousin."

"Somebody's cousin."

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


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

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

"I kept thinking it wasn't right."

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

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

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

"In October?"

"Not to swim. Just to sit."

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

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

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

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

"Sometimes. Do you want to?"

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

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


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

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

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

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

"My mother would say we should get married."

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

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

"Okay. So."

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

"I don't play anything when—"

"Roberta Flack. Every time."

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

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

"Dessert only. That's very civilized."

"We're ten years civilized."

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


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

"Look what survived," she said.

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

"That was our first date."

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

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

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

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

"Or?"

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

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

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

"Is there?"

"There's a small difference."

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

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

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

"Neither do I."

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


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

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

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

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

"That's revisionist."

"That's documentary."

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

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

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

"We could go back to the diner."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

"We did that for year four."

"Did we?"

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

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

"Meaning?"

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

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

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

"Cassata."

"Obviously cassata."

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


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

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

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

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

"You fell asleep."

"I did not."

"You snored through the third act."

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

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

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

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

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

"It's thematic."

"It's lazy and thematic."

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed. "Okay. Then what?"

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

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

"The disaster chicken?"

"You've gotten better."

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

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

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

"Eight."

"Fine. Eight."

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Bianchi's?" he offered.

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

"Not do anything?"

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

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

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

"Forty-five now."

She smiled. "Fine. Forty-five."

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's it?"

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

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

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

"My salads are minimalist."

"Your salads are lettuce."

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


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

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

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

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

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

"That takes four hours."

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

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

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

"Deal."

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

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

"It was mediocre," Dev said.

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


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

"Look what survived."

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

"I was nervous."

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

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

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

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

"That's five hours."

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

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

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

"Probably."

"The whole diner is probably a vape shop."

"Almost certainly."

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

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