I did not fall apart. I note this, not with pride, but with a kind of clinical detachment. I had apparently used up my falling apart in that four-minute shower on day sixty-eight, and what remained was something more functional. I thanked Darnell and transferred his final payment. I sat in my car in the parking garage for a while. Then I went back upstairs and finished my quarterly report.
That evening, I looked at Gary across the dinner table—his particular jaw, his particular hands, the way he tilted his head when he was listening, and I understood I did not know who this person was. I had shared a bed for eleven years with an elaborate, inhabited fiction. And the fiction had no idea I’d figured it out.