“Question eight,” she said. “What have you done in the past year that your partner does not know about?” She turned the page toward the window for the light. “Yes. I signed a sublease on March 14. Studio 3B, 118 Mill Street, six hundred square feet above a tire shop. Eleven hundred and fifty a month, out of the wedding account.” She looked up. “There is a line under it. What is the space for?”
I had written it in April with the only pen in my car.
“Storage,” she read. “For the instruments.”
Downstairs the bakery was washing up, a tap running, a man saying something about a delivery.
“You wrote storage,” Dr. Aline said. “You wrote it six weeks after you signed. Question nine. Who have you told about the doubts you are bringing here?”
“Don’t.”
“Nobody. I haven’t told her. I keep almost telling her in the car and then I ask her about the seating chart instead.” She set the page down flat. “I read this the night you handed it to me in April, Owen. I have waited three weeks and two sessions for you to say one word of it in this room out of your own mouth. You came in here every week and talked about your mother’s rehab and the band budget, and you let that woman plan a wedding.”
“Three weeks,” I said. “You’ve been sitting on that for three weeks.”
“I told you my method before I broke a seal. You signed the page that allows it.”
I wanted to put my fist through the bridge print. I am not a man who hits things. My hands shook anyway.
Then I looked at Carys, because I wanted to watch her be shocked. That was the thing I was owed. She had spent an hour being the wronged one. Now she would find out what I had done, and her face would do something.
Her face did nothing.
She had her hands folded in her lap. She was looking at them the way you look at a bill you already know the amount of.
The floor went out from under me a second time, slower than the first.
“You knew,” I said.
“Owen.”
“You knew.”
Tobias said, quietly, “May I,” and opened the folder.
He pushed a single printed page across the coffee table. RENN PROPERTY GROUP. TENANT WORK ORDER 4471. Property: 118 Mill Street, Unit 3B. Reported: radiator valve leaking at the baseboard. Tenant: O. Marchetti. Signed: O. Marchetti. Date of completion: 3/21. There was my signature in the tenant box, the same slanted O, beside a maintenance code and a time.
“That’s my company’s file,” Tobias said. “We hold the maintenance contract on that building. A name I knew came across my desk in March and I told myself it wasn’t my business.” He sat back. “Then she called me in June and said she’d set a date, and I decided it was my business after all.”
“You went into a tenant file to get a look at me.”
“I went into a tenant file to find out if I was reading it right. Then I sent her one picture.”
Carys still had not lifted her eyes. “Five weeks,” she said. “Since he texted me the work order. I didn’t believe it. I drove past the building on my lunch and I sat in the lot with the engine off.”
“Five weeks.” My voice came out flat. “You sat across from me for five weeks.”
“You had five months.”
That one went in under the ribs and stayed there.
I don’t remember the goodbye. I remember Dr. Aline saying my name once, without force. Then the stairs, the bakery smell, and the lot behind the building with the light going orange over the dumpster.
Carys caught me at her car. She had not brought a coat and she was holding her elbows.
