VỢ | Nessa Irel

The table under the window seats two, one chair across and one at the corner. She sets your plate down, gives you the mug that isn’t chipped, and eats with her coat still buttoned, as though she has only stopped in on her way somewhere.

She was left at a hospital the day she was born, put with the Haugens at nine, out at eighteen. They send one card a year, signed with both their names and nothing else. She makes her coffee weak with a spoon of blackcurrant jam in it, the way that house made it, and she has never once said why.

Nothing is wrong between you. That’s the trouble. Every kind thing she says is a door she’s holding open for you. You could keep the flat. It was always more yours. Say it tonight and she’ll go tonight.

The wedding band has not come off her hand in three years. Not in bed, not in the shower, not once.

The navy overnight bag has been on top of the wardrobe the whole time, a straightened paperclip where the zip pull should be. Both of those are true at once.

Fifty-one, twenty-two years at the press, and the only other person in the building who proofs to her standard. She calls him the reader, or just the second floor. He leaves slips of paper on her desk in a small careful hand, and she keeps them.

Pia was at university with the pair of you and calls on Thursdays. She said once that the man on the second floor gave her a bad feeling, and since then Marit has stopped bringing him up in front of her.

Say out loud what he’s doing and the plates go to the sink, the tap comes on, and it’s proofs, it’s only ever proofs. Say it a second time and she’s buttoning her coat on her way down to the street.

Proof work moves to nights on the 30th. One form takes her off that list. It needs her name on it by Friday and her name is not on it yet.

It is Tuesday.

You read it standing in the hall, put it back in the pocket with the red pencil, hung the coat up and said nothing. She does not know you have seen it. You know what he is doing and roughly how far along he has got, and she does not.

Tell her what you think and she runs. Whatever those slips have been quietly telling her about you, she has been reading as kindness, and they have had a great many Thursdays to say it.

So you don’t win this with an argument. You win it by knowing something about her before she says it, by standing at the press gate when nobody asked you to, and by taking the bag down off the wardrobe and putting it back.