Galina believed that twenty years of marriage gave her the right to have a say. But when Viktor gave her an ultimatum, she chose something he had never expected. Something she herself had never expected, either.
Galina found the suitcase on top of the hallway cupboard at half past nine in the evening. The layer of dust covering it was so thick that her finger left a furrow like a trail through fresh snow.
She pulled it down, and the suitcase struck the hallway floor with a dull thud. Viktor did not even turn around from the kitchen.
It had all begun three days earlier.
On Saturday.
Galina was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of rassolnik, when the phone rang.
Her mother.
Zinaida Pavlovna called every Saturday at exactly two o’clock, as if following a timetable, and Galina always answered with her left hand without letting go of the spoon in her right.
“Galya, my faucet is leaking.”
“Which faucet, Mom?”
“The one in the kitchen. The one you fixed last time. It’s dripping again. It dripped all night, so I put a cloth underneath it.”
Galina pressed the phone between her shoulder and ear and lowered the heat.
“I’ll come by tomorrow and take a look.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday. You have a family.”
“Mom, I’ll come.”
Viktor was sitting at the table, scrolling through something on his phone. His thumb moved rhythmically up the screen. Up, up, up. He did not raise his eyes, but from the way a muscle twitched in his jaw, Galina knew he had heard everything.
She placed the spoon on its rest. The soup bubbled once and went quiet.
“You’re going there again?” he asked without looking at her.
“Her faucet is leaking.”
“Something is always leaking at her place. Or squeaking. Or refusing to open.”
Galina said nothing. She took the plates from the drying rack and set them on the table. Two soup bowls and one small plate for the bread. The same plates they had used for twenty years, white with blue rims. Three pieces from the original set had broken long ago, but she had never bought new ones.
She was used to these.
“Galya.”
“What?”
“I’m asking you seriously. You go to see her every weekend. Every single weekend.”
She placed the breadbasket between the plates and sat opposite him.
“She lives alone, Vitya. She’s seventy-two.”
“And what do we have here? Isn’t this a life?”
At last, he looked up.
His eyes were gray, flecked with brown around the pupils. When they first met, Galina had thought they were the most unusual eyes she had ever seen. Now all she noticed were the red veins in the whites and his swollen eyelids.
“I’m not leaving for a week. It’s half a day.”
“Half of Saturday. Half of Sunday when she calls and says she’s forgotten where she put her bank card. Tuesday evening because she feels lonely. And I sit here by myself.”
Galina wanted to say that he was not by himself. He was sitting in an apartment with a television, a refrigerator full of food, hot water, and a functioning faucet.
But she said nothing.
She ladled rassolnik into his bowl and pushed it toward him.
On Sunday, she went to her mother’s apartment.
Zinaida Pavlovna opened the door wearing a housecoat that had faded to some uncertain shade between blue and gray. She came only as high as Galina’s shoulder, barely five feet one, and every year she seemed to settle a little lower, like a house built on weak foundations.
“Take off your shoes. I’ve just washed the floors.”
The apartment smelled of bleach and boiled potatoes. Galina went into the kitchen. The faucet really was dripping, slowly and with long pauses, as though it were thinking things over.
“Mom, the washer needs replacing. I told you that last time.”
“Then replace it.”
“Mom, you need to call a plumber. A proper one.”
“I’m not letting strangers into my home.”
They had the same conversation every two months.
Galina opened the cabinet beneath the sink, took out the adjustable wrench she herself had left there six months earlier, and crouched down to inspect the pipes. Her knees pressed against the cold tile. Her fingers immediately became wet, and she wiped them on her jeans.
Zinaida Pavlovna stood behind her and watched.
“You’ve lost weight.”
“No, Mom.”
“You have. Does he feed you?”
“I feed myself.”
“Don’t be rude.”
Galina tightened her grip on the wrench more than necessary. The fitting gave way.
“I’m not being rude. I’m stating a fact.”
Her mother fell silent. Then she went into the living room and switched on the television. The voices from some talk show drifted through the wall, and Galina worked beneath that familiar noise, as constant as the hum of a refrigerator.
When she finished, her hands were red from the cold water. She washed them with soap—the same brown laundry soap her mother had bought all her life—and dried them on a kitchen towel decorated with roosters.
Zinaida Pavlovna came out of the room carrying a plate.
“Eat something. Potatoes with dill.”
“Mom, I’m not hungry.”
“Eat.”
Galina sat down and began to eat. The potatoes were soft and crumbly, sprinkled with coarse salt and fresh dill that her mother grew on the windowsill in a cut-off plastic bottle.
The taste of childhood.
The taste of Saturday lunches when her father had still been alive and sat across from her while her mother gave everyone second helpings without asking.
Her father had died eight years earlier.
A heart attack at five in the morning, in the kitchen. Her mother had found him on the floor beside the stove. The kettle had not yet had time to boil.
After that, Zinaida Pavlovna had not changed outwardly. The same slippers, the same housecoat, the same routine.
But Galina noticed that her mother had begun to move more slowly. Not because of illness, but because of something else. It was as though the air around her had grown thicker.
Galina returned home at six.
Viktor was standing in the hallway with his shoes still on and his jacket hanging open, as though he had been waiting for her.
“Where were you?”
“At Mom’s. You know that.”
“For four hours?”
“The faucet took time, and then she fed me lunch.”
He removed his jacket and hung it on a hook. The movement was sharp, making the hook sway.
“Galya, I’m going to tell you something. Don’t take offense.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m tired.”
She placed her bag on the cabinet beside the mirror. The hallway was reflected behind her: the small-patterned wallpaper, the coat rack, his jacket, her scarf hanging from the lower hook.
“Tired of what?”
“Of your mother always coming first. Your mother comes second, too. And third. I’m somewhere in fourth place, after the cat.”
The cat’s name was Filipp. He was sitting in an armchair in the living room, staring at the wall.
“Vitya, don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. I’m counting. You talked to her on the phone three evenings last week. You were gone all day Saturday. Then you went there again on Sunday.”
“Her faucet was leaking.”
“Her faucet was leaking because she refuses to call a plumber. Because she knows you’ll come.”
Galina pulled off her boots and walked past him into the kitchen. She switched on the kettle. The button clicked, and the water began to rumble.
“What are you suggesting? That I abandon her?”
“I’m suggesting that you make a choice.”
She turned around.
He was standing in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. His shoulders were broader than the doorframe, and he was leaning slightly forward, as he always did when he was angry. At six foot one, he seemed to occupy the entire small kitchen.
“Choose between what?”
“Your mother and a normal family. I can’t live like this anymore.”
The kettle boiled. Steam rose and dissolved into the air.
Galina watched it and thought that the steam resembled all the words she would never say aloud. They appeared, rose, and disappeared.
“Are you giving me an ultimatum?”
“I’m telling you how things are.”
“It’s an ultimatum, Vitya.”
“Call it whatever you like.”
She took a mug from the cupboard. It was white, with a chip along the rim—the one she had meant to throw away the previous year but had never been able to.
She poured in the boiling water, dropped in a tea bag, and watched the water darken.
“All right,” she said.
“All right, what?”
“All right. I’ll think about it.”
He went into the living room. He did not slam the door, but closed it firmly. Filipp meowed behind the wall.
Galina sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and listening to the traffic humming outside.
The ninth floor, overlooking the avenue.
For twenty years, she had fallen asleep to that noise and had stopped hearing it.
Now she heard every car.
Monday passed as usual.
Work, the minibus, the grocery store.
She bought chicken, rice, tomatoes, and a carton of milk. In the checkout line ahead of her stood a woman approximately her age, perhaps slightly older, around forty-five, with a boy of about seven. The boy tugged at his mother’s sleeve and asked for a chocolate egg.
The woman said no in an even voice, without irritation. Simply no.
The boy accepted it calmly, as though they had already performed this ritual hundreds of times.
Galina remembered how Seryozha used to ask for sweets in that very store. He had been six then.
Now he was twenty-three and lived in St. Petersburg. He worked as a programmer and called once every two weeks on Sundays, briefly and efficiently, as though making a business call from the office.
She left the store and called her mother.
“Mom, how’s the faucet?”
“It isn’t dripping. You fixed it well.”
“Mom, listen. I want to find you a plumber. A reliable one. Someone you can call whenever something breaks.”
“Why do I need a plumber when I have you?”
Galina stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman carrying shopping bags walked around her, casting her a quick glance.
“Mom, I won’t always be able to come.”
“Why not?”
Because her husband had given her an ultimatum.
Because she was forty-two years old, standing in the street with grocery bags, and did not know where she was supposed to go—to her husband or to her mother.
Because they both demanded the same thing: that she choose.
And she did not know how to choose between people she loved.
“Just in case, Mom.”
“All right, find one. But I’ll check him out first.”
Galina smiled. Her lips curved on their own, though there was nothing to smile about.
On Tuesday evening, Viktor came home later than usual.
Half past eight. Normally, he returned at seven.
Galina was sitting in the kitchen with a book. She was not reading it. She had been holding it open to the same page for nearly an hour.
“Hi.”
“Hi. Dinner’s in the refrigerator.”
“Thanks.”
He reheated the chicken in the microwave and sat at the table. He ate in silence, staring at his plate. His fork tapped against the porcelain at regular, measured intervals.
Like a metronome.
Galina closed the book.
“Vitya.”
“What?”
“Were you serious about what you said? About making a choice?”
He stopped chewing and put down his fork.
“Yes.”
“And if I tell you that I can’t abandon my mother, what will you do?”
“I didn’t say ‘abandon.’ I said ‘choose.’”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, Galya. It isn’t.”
He stood, carried his plate to the sink, washed it, and placed it in the drying rack. His movements were exact and controlled.
Viktor was always like that: whenever he was angry, he did everything more carefully than usual.
“I want you to be here,” he said. “With me. Not only physically, but mentally. But you’re always over there. Thinking about her, calling her, worrying about her. And I’m just another piece of furniture.”
He did not raise his voice.
That was worse than shouting.
Galina looked at his back. His broad back beneath the checked shirt she had bought him for his birthday two years earlier. The fabric stretched across his shoulder blades.
“You’re not furniture,” she said quietly.
“Then prove it.”
He went into the living room.
Another closed door.
More silence and the hum of the avenue.
On Wednesday, Galina worked late.
Accounting, the quarterly report, numbers swimming before her eyes.
Her colleague Rita brought her a cup of coffee from the vending machine and placed it on her desk without saying anything.
Rita was the kind of person who noticed everything and asked no questions. She was in her fifties, had two grown sons, and had divorced fifteen years earlier. On the middle finger of her right hand, she wore a silver ring with a turquoise stone that she had bought for herself on her fortieth birthday.
“Rita.”
“Mm?”
“When you got divorced, did you regret it?”
Rita looked at her over the top of her glasses. They always rested at the very tip of her nose, and she never pushed them back up, almost as though she did it deliberately.
“Regret what?”
“Not trying harder to save the marriage.”
Rita was silent for a moment and took a sip of coffee.
“No. I regretted not leaving earlier.”
“Why?”
“Because for the last three years, I was preserving something that no longer existed. Like a jam jar without any jam. The jar is still there, the lid is screwed on tightly, but there’s nothing inside.”
Galina wrapped both hands around the plastic cup. It was hot, almost painfully so, but she did not pull her hands away.
“What if it isn’t about love, but about a choice? What if someone tells you it has to be one thing or the other?”
“Then look for a third option. The one they didn’t offer you.”
Galina finished her coffee. Coffee from the machine was always bitter, with an aftertaste of plastic and powdered milk.
But she drank every drop.
On Thursday, her mother called not at two in the afternoon, but at ten in the morning.
“Galya, I don’t feel well.”
Galina jumped up from her desk so quickly that her chair rolled backward and struck the cabinet.
“What happened? Mom, what hurts?”
“My blood pressure. Two hundred and ten over one hundred and twenty.”
“Did you call an ambulance?”
“I don’t need an ambulance.”
“Mom!”
“Don’t shout. I took a pill. I just feel terrible.”
Galina grabbed her bag and ran for the exit. Rita watched her leave but said nothing.
The minibus ride to her mother’s apartment took forty minutes.
Galina stood gripping the overhead rail and counted the stops. Her palms were sweating. She wiped them on her jacket and grabbed the rail again.
Zinaida Pavlovna opened the door herself.
She was pale, her lips tinged blue, but she was standing.
“You got here quickly.”
“Mom, let’s check your pressure.”
It had fallen to one hundred and seventy over one hundred.
Galina made her mother lie down, placed a pillow beneath her legs, and brought her a glass of water.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
“I had tea.”
“Mom, you need to eat properly.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
Galina went into the kitchen. She put eggs on to boil. She sliced the bread thinly, just as her mother liked it, and took the butter from the refrigerator.
The butter was kept in an old yellow plastic butter dish with a broken corner on the lid. It had to be at least thirty years old.
She stood at the stove and watched the water begin to boil. Small, frequent bubbles rose from the bottom of the pot, and the eggs knocked against one another.
Her phone rang.
Viktor.
“Where are you?”
“At Mom’s. She became ill. Her blood pressure shot up.”
Silence on the line.
Three seconds.
Four.
Five.
“Again.”
“Vitya, she really is ill.”
“Galya, she’s genuinely ill every time. When I become ill, will you come running to me from across the city in forty minutes, too?”
She did not answer.
The water boiled.
The eggs knocked together.
“You know what?” he said. “I understand everything now.”
Then he hung up.
Galina placed the phone on the table beside the butter dish. She switched off the heat, removed the eggs, and put them in cold water.
Her hands worked automatically, separately from her mind.
And her mind was somewhere far away—not here, not in this kitchen with its yellow wallpaper and the smell of boiled eggs.
She returned home late.
Half past ten.
Viktor was sitting in the living room. The television was off. The lights were out, and only the laptop screen illuminated his face from below, casting strange shadows that made him look older.
“I need to tell you something,” he said when she stopped in the doorway.
“Go ahead.”
“I filed for divorce.”
She stood in the doorway with her keys in her hand.
The key ring was heavy: five keys and a cat-shaped charm that Seryozha had given her when he was twelve. The paint had worn off, leaving the cat gray and eyeless.
“When did you file?”
“Today. At lunchtime.”
The air in the room was stale. He must have spent the entire evening with the windows closed.
“You didn’t even wait for me to come home.”
“I’ve been waiting for twenty years.”
Her arms fell to her sides. The keys struck her thigh with a metallic jingle.
“Vitya, she was ill. Her blood pressure was two hundred and ten.”
“I know. You told me. And you went running to her. As always.”
“What was I supposed to do? Not go?”
“You could have called an ambulance. You could have called a neighbor. You could have done something that didn’t involve dropping everything and racing across half the city. But you never do, because you don’t need me, Galya. You need her.”
He spoke calmly and evenly, like a newsreader announcing tomorrow’s weather.
Tomorrow it would rain, and nothing could be done about it.
Galina entered the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked.
“I’ve been with you for twenty years, Vitya. I washed clothes, cooked, worked. I raised Seryozha. I did everything that was required of me.”
“Required. Exactly. You did what was required, not what you wanted.”
She looked up at him.
“Do you know what I wanted?”
“No. Because you never told me.”
Silence.
Somewhere downstairs, the entrance door slammed.
Filipp jumped onto the bed and lay down between them like a furry divider.
On Friday, Galina left work an hour early.
She went neither home nor to her mother.
She went to Seryozha.
Not physically. Seryozha was in St. Petersburg, while she was in Nizhny Novgorod.
She called him.
“Mom, hi. Is everything okay?”
“Dad filed for divorce.”
Silence. Then a rustling sound, as though he had moved to another seat.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Because of Grandma.”
“What do you mean?”
Galina walked down the street, past the bus stop, past the pharmacy, past the courtyard with the swings where Seryozha had once played. The swings were different now—new and bright yellow—but the place was the same.
“He thinks I spend too much time with her. That I choose her instead of my family.”
Seryozha was silent.
Then he said, “Do you?”
The question struck beneath her ribs.
Not because it was cruel.
Because it was honest.
“I don’t want to choose.”
“Mom, you don’t have to choose between people. You need to choose yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you need to stop living for everyone else. Even if it’s only for a minute.”
He said it gently but firmly.
His voice had become an adult man’s voice, and Galina realized that she no longer recognized in it the little boy who had once begged for chocolate eggs at the checkout.
On Saturday morning, Galina woke at six.
Viktor was still asleep. They lay in the same bed, but between them was an empty strip of space the width of a hand, and that narrow strip felt wider than the entire avenue outside their window.
She got up quietly and went into the kitchen.
She brewed coffee in a cezve—real coffee with cardamom, the way she had learned to make it long ago, before she was married.
Viktor did not like coffee with cardamom. He called it “a spicy misunderstanding.”
But she loved it.
She stood by the window with her cup and looked down.
The courtyard was empty except for a janitor in an orange vest sweeping the path. The broom scraped softly across the asphalt, and for some reason, the sound calmed her.
She was forty-two.
Her son was grown.
Her mother was growing old.
Her husband was leaving.
Everything that had made up her life was being dismantled piece by piece, like furniture during a move.
And she stood there with her coffee, listening to the broom.
The phone rang.
Her mother.
“Galya, are you coming today?”
“Mom, wait. I need to think.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
A pause.
“Something has happened,” Zinaida Pavlovna said.
It was not a question. It was a statement.
“Viktor filed for divorce.”
Her mother was silent for a long time.
Twenty seconds.
Galina counted them.
“Because of me?” Zinaida Pavlovna finally asked.
“Not because of you, Mom.”
“Don’t lie. It’s because of me.”
Galina closed her eyes.
“He thinks I don’t know how to be a wife. That I only know how to be a daughter.”
Zinaida Pavlovna sighed.
It was a heavy, slightly wheezing sigh, and Galina heard her mother’s age in it—all seventy-two years.
“It’s my fault, Galya.”
“No.”
“It is. I’m holding on to you. I know I am. I call, and you drop everything. I’ve become accustomed to it. I’m frightened without you. Ever since your father died, I’ve been frightened.”
Her mother’s voice trembled on the words “your father,” and Galina gripped the cup with both hands to keep herself from crying.
“Mom, don’t say that.”
“No, listen to me. You’ve spent twenty years living for me and for him. When have you ever lived for yourself?”
The same thing Seryozha had said.
Word for word.
Her son and her mother, who saw each other once every six months, had both said exactly the same thing.
Galina placed the cup on the windowsill. The coffee had grown cold, and cardamom floated on the surface.
Viktor woke at nine.
He came into the kitchen and looked at her. She was sitting at the table with a notebook in front of her.
“What’s that?”
“A list.”
“What kind of list?”
“Things I need.”
He sat opposite her.
She showed him the page. It had two columns. On the left were the things she was taking. On the right were the things she was leaving behind.
“You’re leaving?” he asked.
His voice changed. It was no longer the flat, dry tone he had used over the previous few days.
Something trembled.
Not exactly in his voice.
Somewhere in his throat.
“You’re the one who filed for divorce, Vitya.”
“I filed because I wanted you to be frightened. I wanted you to choose me.”
Galina looked at him.
At his gray eyes with their brown flecks, his swollen eyelids, and the wrinkle between his eyebrows that had appeared about five years earlier and had only deepened since.
“You wanted me to be frightened.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m not frightened.”
He leaned back in his chair. It creaked.
“So what happens now?”
“Now I choose.”
“Your mother?”
“No, Vitya. Not my mother.”
She ran her finger down the list.
“I choose the suitcase.”
“What?”
“The suitcase. My suitcase, with my things inside it. And my own life, where I don’t have to choose between two people who both want me to belong only to them.”
Viktor said nothing.
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
Then he said, “That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
That same evening, she climbed up to retrieve the suitcase.
It was burgundy and old, with a zipper that stuck and a missing luggage tag. They had bought it when they went to Anapa. Seryozha had been four years old then.
All he remembered from the trip were the jellyfish and the ice cream.
Galina remembered Viktor carrying the suitcase in one hand and holding Seryozha on his shoulder with the other.
She remembered walking behind them and thinking, This is happiness.
Simple and heavy, like that suitcase.
She ran her palm over the lid. Dust coated her fingers.
She unzipped it.
Inside lay a child’s sun hat.
White, decorated with anchors.
Seryozha’s.
Galina could not remember how it had ended up there.
She took it out, held it in her hands, and placed it on a shelf.
Then she began packing.
Viktor stood in the kitchen doorway, watching as she put in a sweater, jeans, underwear, her phone charger, her makeup bag, and the notebook with the two columns.
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll rent an apartment. For now.”
“Galya, this is foolish.”
“Maybe.”
“You can’t just leave. We need to talk.”
“We’ve been talking for twenty years, Vitya. And for twenty years, we’ve been saying the same things.”
He stepped toward her.
She raised a hand.
“Don’t. Not now.”
He stopped.
His arms hung at his sides, and Galina noticed that his fingers were trembling. Barely, almost imperceptibly.
“I didn’t want this,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because you gave me a choice: my mother or you. But I’m not an object to be divided between people. And I’m not a judge who has to deliver a verdict.”
She closed the suitcase.
The zipper stuck halfway, and she tugged at the pull tab, as she always had.
Three sharp pulls, and it gave way.
“I love you, Vitya. And I love Mom. But I’m not going to let myself be torn apart anymore. It’s killing me. You don’t see it because it’s killing me quietly.”
She picked up the suitcase.
It was heavier than it looked.
Filipp sat in the hallway, staring at her with his round yellow eyes.
“I’m taking the cat,” she said.
“Galya…”
“That isn’t open for discussion.”
She left the building at nine in the evening.
It was October and already dark. The lamp above the entrance flickered. The suitcase wheels rattled across the asphalt, one of them squeaking, the sound echoing through the empty courtyard.
Filipp sat silently in his carrier.
He did not even meow.
As though he understood.
Galina walked to the bench near the entrance and sat down. She placed the suitcase beside her and the carrier on her lap.
Then she called her mother.
“Mom, I left Viktor.”
Silence.
“Where did you go?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Come to my place.”
Galina looked up.
The ninth floor.
The kitchen windows.
The light was on.
Viktor stood at the window, looking down. She could not see his face, only his silhouette, but she knew he was standing there.
“No, Mom. I’m not coming to you.”
“Why?”
“Because then he would be right.”
Her mother was silent.
Then she said, “You’re clever, Galya. You always have been. Foolish, but clever.”
Galina laughed softly, with only her lips, so quietly that no one watching would have noticed.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Mom.”
“Call me.”
She ordered a taxi and gave the driver the address of a hotel near the railway station. It was inexpensive and clean, with small rooms and corridors that smelled of laundry detergent.
The car was warm.
The driver turned on the radio. Some song from the nineties was playing, and Galina watched the streetlights drift past the window and thought that nothing had ended.
Divorce was not a period.
It was a comma.
Her mother would continue calling on Saturdays, and Galina would answer.
Viktor would stand at the window for a while longer, then sit down at the table and reheat his dinner.
The suitcase stood by her feet.
One wheel still squeaked.
Filipp meowed.
For the first time that evening.
“I know,” Galina told him. “Me too.”
The taxi turned onto the bridge.
The river below shone black, and the lights were reflected in the water in trembling streaks.
The hotel smelled of laundry detergent, just as she had expected.
Her room was on the third floor. It was small, with a narrow bed, a bedside table, and a window overlooking the courtyard. The wallpaper was beige and anonymous.
There was not a single picture on the walls.
She placed the suitcase beside the door and let Filipp out of the carrier. He immediately crawled beneath the bed.
She sat on the edge of the mattress.
The springs did not creak.
They were not the same springs.
Her phone vibrated.
A message from Viktor.
One word:
“Why?”
She stared at it for a minute.
Perhaps two.
Then she typed a reply:
“So I can breathe.”
She sent it and placed the phone facedown on the bedside table.
It was quiet outside.
There was no avenue, no traffic, no constant hum she had grown accustomed to over twenty years.
The silence was so dense that Galina could hear her own breathing.
She lay down without undressing, still wearing her jeans and sweater, directly on top of the bedspread that smelled of someone else’s home.
The ceiling was white.
Clean.
No cracks, no stains, no history.
Simply a white ceiling in an unfamiliar room.
Filipp crawled out from beneath the bed and jumped onto her stomach.
Heavy, warm, and purring.
She rested a hand on his back and closed her eyes.
Nine o’clock in the evening.
October.
The first evening when she owed nothing to anyone.
It was a strange feeling.
Like an empty room—frightening and inviting at the same time.
She lay there listening to the cat purr.
Tomorrow would be tomorrow.
