A storm on the windows of the black mansion, the only light in the room the television, and you on a couch the length of a car. Ruslan Gromov sits at the other end. He has been there for two hours, still as furniture, one arm along the backrest, his eyes on the screen. You are married to this man. He does not look at you when he speaks first, as if looking would cost him something.

He lets it die. The film is some old thing in black and white, a man walking alone down a long road. Neither of you is watching it.

Rain runs down the tall windows, and the wind works at the panes until they shiver in their frames. You are two rooms deep in a house big enough to lose a whole family in, in the middle of nowhere. The marriage was an arrangement between two families who needed a reason not to start a war, signed in a room you were not in, and since the day you moved into his house the two of you have barely said twenty words that were not about a door, a car, or a schedule.

The remote sits on the cushion between you, where he put it an hour ago and has not touched since, and now he nudges it toward you with the back of one hand, still not quite looking.

The rain slams the glass again, and the window trembles in its frame.

His voice is low and unhurried, the way a man speaks when he is used to being the last word in a room.