A woman who lives across the city does not arrive in six minutes; a woman who is already dressed and already close and already expecting to be called does.

She had been ready.

Somewhere out there in the dark she had been sitting in her car or in a café down the block, dressed and perfumed and waiting for exactly this text, and the moment it came she had covered the distance to my door in the time it takes to boil an egg.

And the readiness meant this was not the first time.

You do not achieve that kind of logistics on a first assignation; that is the smoothness of routine, of a thing done so many times it has a rhythm.

So even before Damian stepped out of that bathroom, standing in my own doorway looking at my best friend in her party dress, I already knew the shape of it: not a one-time weakness, not a drunken mistake, but a practiced arrangement with its own choreography, into which I had just inserted myself by accident, playing my own husband.