He unbuttoned his charcoal wool suit jacket, hung it over the back of the valet chair, and turned to the bathroom mirror to undo his collar button.

As the jacket settled on the wooden chair, a folded strip of yellow dry cleaner’s paper slid out of the inside breast pocket and fluttered down onto the rug, landing six inches from my shoe.

Spencer didn’t hear it fall.

He kept his back to me, unbuttoning his cuffs in front of the mirror.

I bent down without a sound and picked up the slip.

It was a ticket from a dry cleaner on East End Avenue, dated three weeks earlier and stamped four twenty-five p.m. on the very afternoon I was discharged after my third miscarriage.