Aaliyah went to work at the hospital because the alternative was sitting in the laundry room staring at white cabinets until the cabinets started staring back. She scrubbed into surgery. She counted instruments. She handed the surgeon what he needed before he asked, the way she always had, and if her hands shook once during a routine appendectomy she blamed it on coffee and nobody contradicted her. In the break room a nurse named Priya asked if everything was all right at home, and Aaliyah said fine in the tone that meant do not ask again, and Priya, who was kind and experienced, did not ask again.
Marcus texted twice the first day, once the second, and then stopped, which she recognized as either respect or strategy. She did not answer the texts. She let Elias FaceTime him before bed, and she stood outside the frame so that her son would see only his father's face and not the weather in hers. Elias told Marcus about a red car that had beaten a blue car in a race across the bedroom rug. Marcus laughed in the exact way he always laughed at Elias's races. Aaliyah listened from the hallway and felt the marriage like a tooth she could not stop touching with her tongue.
On the fourth morning she drove to Marcus's office.
The firm occupied the second floor of a glass building near Lake Oswego, all clean lines and potted fiddle-leaf figs and the low confident hum of people who designed other people's buildings for a living. Marcus Washington, Associate Principal, his name on a frosted door at the end of a hallway that smelled of coffee and laser printer. Aaliyah had been there dozens of times—for birthday lunches, for the Christmas party, for the afternoon Elias threw up in the receptionist’s trash can and everyone pretended not to notice. She had never before arrived unannounced with the specific intention of finding another woman's ghost in the furniture.
The receptionist, a young man named Cody with kind eyes and a nose ring, brightened when he saw her.
"Mrs. Washington! He's in a client call until—"
"I'm not here for Marcus," Aaliyah said. "Has an older woman been coming by? Gray in her hair, usually wears a beige cardigan? She'd be here in the afternoons."