The pattern has a shape now. Tuesdays and Thursdays, sometimes Wednesdays too. He leaves work late. He comes home smelling like a bar I've never been to — cedar and lime, something with a name I'd never order.

I still make his favorites. Short ribs on Tuesday. Chicken with preserved lemon on Thursday. I don't know why. Maybe some part of me thinks if the food is good enough, he'll remember why he stays.

I find the receipt on a Wednesday, doing laundry, checking his pockets out of habit. A café in the West Village. 2:14 PM. He told me he had a client lunch in Midtown that day. I stand there holding the little slip of paper like it might explain itself if I look long enough.

It doesn't.

I put it back exactly where I found it. Folded the same way. I don't say anything. I tell myself I'm choosing patience. Some nights I'm not sure if that's true, or if I'm just scared of what happens after I stop.

Our anniversary falls on a Friday. Three years since the courthouse, since the borrowed tie and the forty-dollar dress and the way he looked at me like I was the only person in the room. I spend the whole afternoon on the short ribs. Six hours low and slow, the way he likes them. I make the polenta creamy, with extra butter, because that's how his mother used to make it before she passed, and he told me once it tasted like being loved.

I dig the thrift-store dress out of the closet. It still fits, barely. I put it on and look in the mirror and for a second I feel like her again — the girl before all this, the one who believed things worked out if you just loved someone enough.

I light the one good candle we own. I set two plates. I wait.

At eight, I text him. *Table's ready whenever you are.* No reply.

At nine, I text again. *Everything okay?* The message sits there. Delivered. Not read.

The candle burns down slow. Wax pools on the saucer beneath it. I sit at the table in my wedding dress and watch the flame and think about all the things I could be doing instead of this. I don't move.

He walks in at 9:45. His tie is loose, same as always now. He glances at the table — the candle, the two plates, the polenta going cold in its dish — and doesn't stop walking.

"Sorry, I already ate," he says. "Grabbed sushi with the guys after work."

"It's our anniversary," I say.

He stops. Turns halfway. "Right. Yeah. Happy anniversary." He says it the way you'd say happy birthday to a coworker you don't really know.

He doesn't see the dress. He doesn't see the candle. He goes down the hall and the bedroom door clicks shut behind him.

I sit there a long time. The candle gutters and I let it. I don't blow it out. I watch the wax spill over the edge of the saucer and harden on the tablecloth, and something in me spills over too, quiet and slow, the same way.

I cry without making a sound. I've had practice. I press my palm against my mouth and let it happen, because there's no one to hear it and no one to perform for. When it's over, I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and clear the table. I wrap the short ribs in foil. I blow out the candle. I go to sleep on the couch, though I tell myself it's because I don't want to wake him.

In the morning he comes out of the bedroom already scrolling his phone. He walks past the table — still set, plates untouched, foil catching the light — and doesn't say a word about it. He pours himself coffee. Drinks it standing at the counter.

"You seen my gray tie?" he asks, not looking up.

"Hall closet. Left hook."

"Thanks."

That's it. That's the whole conversation. He finds the tie, knots it in the hallway mirror, and grabs his keys.

"I'll be late again tonight," he says. "Big presentation."

I don't ask which client. I already know I won't get a real answer.

The door shuts. I stand in the kitchen and look at the table, still dressed for a night that never happened. I clear the plates one by one. I scrape the cold polenta into the trash. I wrap what's left of the short ribs — foil crinkling under my fingers, the same fingers that are always red, always cracked — and set the package in the fridge for a version of him that might come back to it later. He won't.

I turn on the faucet and let it run over my hands. The water is hot. I don't move them away. I stand there until my skin turns pink, until the sound of the water is the only thing in the apartment, and I let myself think, just once, clearly: *I don't think he's coming back either.*

Then I turn off the tap and go get dressed for the day, because somebody in this apartment still has things to do.

Bryan comes over on a Tuesday now too. Four nights a week has become the new normal, though nobody's said it out loud. I'm at the sink scraping plates when I hear his voice climb over the TV static.

"Bro, you could be running a fund right now. Instead you're coming home to..." He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to.

There's a pause. Then Dorian laughs. Low. Easy. The kind of laugh you give when someone says something true and you don't want to admit it.

He does not correct him.

I stand there with a plate in one hand and the sponge in the other, water running over my knuckles, and I wait to feel something sharp. It doesn't come. What comes instead is quieter and worse — a kind of settling, like a stone finding the bottom of a lake it's been sinking toward for months.

I finish the dishes. I dry my hands on the towel hanging from the oven door. I do not come out.

That night, after Bryan leaves and the apartment goes still, Dorian's phone buzzes on the nightstand. He's already half-asleep, or pretending to be. I watch the screen light up the ceiling in a pale blue wash.

It's a photo. Cataleya, backless dress, the Grant sapphires at her throat, the skyline behind her lit up like something out of a magazine. *Wish you were here instead of whoever you're stuck with tonight.*

Dorian doesn't move for a long moment. I watch him through my lashes, my breathing slow and even, performing sleep the way I've gotten good at performing so many things. He stares at the photo. A full minute, maybe more. Then he deletes the thread.

He doesn't block her number.

He sets the phone face-down and lies back in the dark beside me. My hands are curled under my chin, cracked at the knuckles, and he doesn't reach for them. He never does anymore. I keep my eyes closed and let the silence between us do what it's been doing for months now — widen.

The next afternoon I go to the store. Chicken thighs are on sale, ninety-nine cents a pound, and I think about the fried chicken Dorian used to ask for on bad days, back when bad days were something we survived together. I buy buttermilk. I buy the good paprika, not the store brand. I want, one more time, to make something he'll actually eat at the table across from me.

I come home twenty minutes earlier than usual. The elevator's fast today. I balance the bags on my hip and I'm reaching for my keys when I hear his voice through the door.

Bright. Animated. A voice I haven't heard aimed at me in a long time.

I stop. The bags dig into my forearm. Through the thin wall, his voice carries like he's rehearsed this — like he's said it before, maybe to a mirror, maybe to Bryan a dozen times already.

"...file for divorce first, obviously, that's clean, that's simple. Then I take my time with Cataleya, no rush, let her think it's her idea. Her father's got that VC arm — one word from her and I'm not doing quarterly projections for some mid-level nobody anymore."

Bryan's voice, tinny through the phone speaker. "She's dead weight, bro. Always has been. You're about to level up."

Dorian laughs. Full. Unburdened. A laugh I remember from our first year together, when we used to split a six-dollar pizza and call it a feast.

"I should've done this a year ago," he says. "I just felt bad, you know? Like kicking a dog."

I stand in the hallway. Four seconds. I count them, though I don't mean to — one, the bag handles cutting red lines into my palm; two, the chicken thighs sweating cold through the plastic; three, my own heartbeat, steady, steadier than I expect; four, the sound of my own key sliding into the lock.

I open the door.

Dorian's face drains white mid-sentence, phone still lifted, Bryan's tiny frozen face on the screen between us. I don't look at either of them. I walk past the couch, past the coffee table with its ring stains, into the kitchen, and I set the grocery bags down on the counter one at a time. Slow. Careful. The chicken thighs. The buttermilk. The good paprika. I line them up like I'm still going to cook.

Then I straighten, and I turn, and I look at him.

"I'll see you at the courthouse Monday morning."

I say it the way I'd tell him dinner's ready. No heat in it. No tears. Just the truth, finally spoken out loud in a room where it can't be taken back.

His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

I walk to the bedroom and close the door behind me, gently, the way you close a door on a room you don't plan to enter again. Through the wall, I hear the FaceTime call go silent — Bryan's voice cut off mid-syllable, the screen probably gone black in Dorian's shaking hand.

I sit on the edge of the bed. My hands are steady. I look down at them — red, cracked, mine — and for the first time in three years, I don't think about what they can make for someone else.