Sloan packed as if she were leaving a hotel that had insulted her — loudly, inefficiently, with commentary designed to travel through walls. She stacked shoe boxes in the hallway. She argued with Harrison about whether the stand mixer she had bought with money I now understood was partly mine counted as hers. It counted as hers, I said from the kitchen doorway, if she took it and left the spare set of keys on the counter before she went. She took it. She did not leave the keys until Harrison put them there himself, his face the color of a man swallowing a lesson whole.
I stayed practical because practicality was the only dignity left that did not require an audience. I changed the Wi-Fi password. I called the post office about holding mail that had begun to arrive in Sloan's name. I wrote a list of what belonged to the house — the good knives, the Dutch oven, the quilt on the guest bed that Sloan had decided was "actually kind of chic" and moved to the master — and I checked each item the way a nurse checks a pulse. Harrison helped, silently. Once, carrying a box of Sloan's winter coats down the stairs, he stopped on the landing and said, without looking at me, "I keep thinking about Dad."
"What about him?"
"He would have stopped this sooner."
I considered the man who had remodeled the kitchen and paid cash and never once, in twenty years, opened a statement he could not explain. "Your father," I said, "would have stopped it the first time someone moved his wife's photograph into a drawer. I am slower. I am learning. Do not confuse late with wrong."
Harrison nodded. The box cut a red line into his palm. He went down the stairs.
On Saturday evening, after Sloan had gone to her sister's to "get air," Harrison sat with me at the island and practiced the repayment schedule aloud, as if saying the numbers might make them less true. Three hundred a month. Then four, when his raise came. Then a balloon payment from his bonus if the bonus came. I listened. I did not soften the total. I did not offer to forgive a portion for good behavior. Love, that year had taught me, is not a rewards program.