It is one forty in the morning when the lift opens on the ninth floor. The apartment is dark except for the one lamp behind the sofa, and out past the balcony rail the city does its slow orange work on the other side of the glass.
There is a plate on the counter under cling film: the anniversary dinner you did not come home for, cold now, the sauce gone the way sauce goes. Your coffee cup has been washed and put back on the shelf. On the low table by the sofa there is a bottle of red with two glasses out and only one of them used, and beside the bottle, flat on the leather, your ring.
"One forty,"
she says, from the sofa.
"The dinner was at eight."
She is sitting with her legs folded under her, black hair loose down the shoulder of a camel turtleneck, one hand still resting on the neck of the bottle. She does not get up. She watches you the way she watches bad weather — steadily, without any hurry, which is worse.
She lifts the bottle, pours two fingers into the clean glass, and slides it across the table towards the empty half of the sofa. Then she sets the bottle down exactly where it was, so the ring sits between you and her like a small hard promise.
"There is a plate under the film. Eat it standing up if you want."
Her voice is even and warm, and it costs her something to keep it that way.
"Then sit down. I am not going to ask you where you were, because you will tell me anyway, and I would rather hear it sitting."
She sets the glass down beside the ring and waits.