Part One: Two Hours

I have thought a great deal about the fact that I ironed that jacket myself.

It was a Tuesday in March, and I ironed it at six-forty in the morning at the board I keep set up in the corner of our bedroom, because Luca had a client thing and wanted the gray one, and the gray one had been in the dryer too long.

I did the collar and then the shoulders and then the sleeves, and I hung it on the closet door, and I went downstairs and made two lunches and a coffee and got my daughter’s hair into something that would survive a school day.

I want to be clear that I was not unhappy that morning.

That’s the part people find hardest to believe afterward, and it’s the part I insist on.

I was tired.

I was thirty-two and I was tired the way everybody I knew was tired.

But if you had stopped me on the stairs at seven in the morning and asked me how my marriage was, I would have said fine, and I would have meant it, and I would have been describing something that had not existed for about two years.

At 12:14 he texted: don’t hold lunch, urgent thing came up with the new client. love you.

I texted back a thumbs up, because I was in the middle of a bank reconciliation for a landscaping company that had, for the fourth month running, deposited a customer check into the wrong account.

I do bookkeeping.

Three clients — a landscaper, a two-chair salon, and a small HVAC outfit run by a man named Ferris who cannot read a balance sheet and does not want to learn.

I do it three days a week from a desk in what is technically our dining room, and I have done it for six years, and it brings in about nineteen thousand dollars a year, which is a number that is going to matter later.

I got home at four-forty.

I put a load in.

I check pockets.

I have always checked pockets, because Luca has been putting things through the wash since we were twenty-two — coins, USB drives, once a hearing aid battery, once, memorably, the entirety of a client’s business card collection, which came out the other side as a gray brick.