A conductor called last boarding for a train Elena was not taking. A couple kissed near the stairs as if the station were still capable of ordinary romance. Marcus reached for Elena's bag and she stepped back, a small movement that cost more than stepping forward would have.
"We're going somewhere with walls," Elena said. "Then you talk. Both of you."
Claire started to shrug out of the coat. Elena shook her head once.
"I said keep it. I want to understand what I'm looking at before you undress the evidence."
Marcus drove. Elena sat in the passenger seat of his dark sedan with the rolling bag wedged behind her feet like a stubborn witness. Claire sat in the back, silent, the coat still on, her face turned toward the window where Midland's night streets unspooled in rain-dark streaks. No one spoke for eleven blocks. The radio was off. The heater ticked. Elena watched Marcus's hands on the wheel and remembered, with a clarity that felt like insult, how those hands had looked holding an engagement ring in a restaurant six months earlier, how they had trembled then too, and how she had mistaken the trembling for joy.
They went to Marcus's apartment because Elena's hotel reservation was across town and because Elena refused, on principle, to have this conversation in a lobby with a free breakfast sign. The apartment was third floor, exposed brick, the kind of place young professionals rented when they believed the future was a loft with good light. Elena had helped him hang the framed jazz posters. She had slept in the bed whose sheets she could see through the open bedroom door. She had cooked in the kitchen whose counter still held two wine glasses from what looked like an evening that had not expected her arrival.