Chapter 2

The next afternoon I went down to the building management office.

The manager was a middle-aged woman who liked to tell me how successful Adrian had become. She pulled up the resident profile for me and asked with a smile, "Professor Vale is going to Chile for an observing run next month. Do you want me to reserve the visitor parking for him as usual?"

I looked at the name on the screen. Nora Bennett, resident's spouse.

"Take it off."

She blinked.

"All of it?"

"All of it."

She didn't ask again, just clicked a few times. The screen refreshed and my name was gone.

The wind was coming off the Charles when I walked out. I stood at the curb and felt suddenly light, as if I had just been carried out of a house that had never been mine.

At home I started clearing out the study.

The room had once been my workspace. After Adrian became a professor, I rewrote his grants, proofread his talks, and handled the press until his files took over the shelves inch by inch. Now the center shelf held Lily's project folder, labeled Public Astronomy Outreach Project.

I pulled out the gray box at the very bottom. Inside were my old interview notes and one unfinished proposal.

The Public Night Sky Project.

It was the outreach project I had wanted to create: a way to give the night sky beyond the observatory back to people who had never had a chance to set foot inside a university.

Adrian read it once and said only, "Too much like a magazine feature. Not academic enough."

I never brought it up again.

That evening Lily posted on Facebook. Lights on the water in Copenhagen, a wine glass by the window, and in the corner of the frame a man's wrist. The old watch on it was my wedding gift to Adrian, the band worn pale along the edges.

Her caption read, "A night of work isn't so cold when someone brings you along."

I turned off my phone and went back to packing books.

Adrian came back three days later. The first thing he looked at was the dining table.

"Why isn't there dinner?"

"I already ate."

He frowned and set the gift box in his hand on the coffee table.

"For you."

I looked at him.

"Should I open it?"

"Up to you."

Inside was a silver-gray fountain pen. The nib was beautiful, the packaging elegant. I picked up the lid and saw a line of tiny letters engraved on the inside.

L.M.

Adrian's face changed.

"That's—"

"Lily's?"

He was quiet for a beat, then pulled his tie loose.

"She handled the lab reception in Copenhagen for me. It's a gift, that's all. You don't have to read something into everything."

"I'm not reading anything into it."

"Then what's with the attitude?"

I put the pen back in the box.

"You give her presents. That's fine."

"Nora."

His voice dropped into the tone he always used in lectures, the one that left no room for argument.

"Lily is my postdoc. She has real potential. I look after her for the sake of the project."

I nodded.

"Then from now on you can look after the project yourself."

That night I carried my pillow into the guest room. Adrian stood in the doorway watching me make the bed, as if he finally sensed something was wrong. But in the end, all he said was, "You've been really hard to talk to lately."

I didn't answer. I was done taking a sentence apart and explaining it to someone who had never once bothered to listen.