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driving home to dc on a late Sunday afternoon, Diana and Mark passed a truck burning on the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

The truck was in the northbound lanes, perpendicular to the bridge. The sides of the truck were already illegible, black with smoke. The fire rushed toward the sky in great plumes, bright orange giving way to puffy black clouds, thick and impenetrable. Diana imagined what it would be like to walk through such a cloud, to experience the sensation of sudden blindness, smoke pressing into your eyes and ears and nostrils until the cloud absorbed you, becoming part of the fire. She leaned forward until her seatbelt caught, trying to wrap her mind around what she was seeing—the impossibly tall flames, the heat radiating in the air, visible against the still bright sky, the line of cars paused dangerously close, held back by an invisible barrier. Diana was considering the combined effort it must have taken to convince that much traffic to stop, when Mark reached from the driver’s side and pushed her toward the seat, her back slamming against the worn leather.

“That’s distracting.” Mark said this, as he did many things directed at Diana, out of the corner of his mouth. He always gave the impression that speaking to Diana was painful, forced. It was not unlike Mark to believe Diana was the distraction and not, in this case, the enormous

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clouds of smoke curling around the tops of the bridge, disappearing the green iron. She knew he was watching the fire as well, the truck now directly opposite them. Diana crossed her arms and rolled her eyes, and immediately felt flustered at her own actions. Before, she never would have dared to show her irritation so blatantly. Before, she had been consumed with being the good wife, but she also thought she had been in a loving marriage, so she had her reasons. They passed the truck and Diana turned around in her seat, consumed by the fire, watching in fascination as the flames turned even more orange, the smoke above impossibly thick. A deep smudge on an otherwise flawless sky.

back home, Diana did her due diligence of helping Mark carry in the bags before escaping to the bathroom to look up the truck fire. A short article posted on WTOP provided minimal information—the fire was due to a car failure, not malicious intent. How odd our times are that the article had to provide such a clarification, Diana thought. The only other information the article provided was on the traffic delays, on a fire truck entering against traffic in order to reach the burning vehicle. She perched on the closed toilet seat and considered what this must look like, fire and smoke meeting the great gush of water, practically hearing the sizzle of extinguished flames.

Mark yelled her name from the bedroom, upstairs. She didn’t have to see him to know he was unpacking, her still-closed suitcase already a nuisance to him.

They had gone away for the weekend to a couples retreat in Connecticut. The website promised in-depth couples counseling, free of the normal stresses of everyday life. It also promised a rekindling of romance, a reckoning of any foundational issues within the relationship—specifically, the ones buried deep below or that you were not even aware you had. The website guaranteed that couples would leave the retreat feeling renewed, refreshed, and more committed to their relationship than ever before. Diana was more exhausted than she had been before they left and felt exactly the same toward Mark, if not even slightly more irritable. When he first suggested the couples retreat, she had been on board with the idea. Maybe the retreat would mend what had been brewing between them for years; maybe it would convince

Mark he was still in love with her, although all signs pointed to the exact opposite. Maybe the retreat would give Diana the permission to excuse herself from the marriage, slipping out a side door after gaining proof that she did her level best to save the marriage—she had agreed to the couples retreat, after all. At different points throughout the weekend, her reasoning changed. The few times Mark smiled in her direction, it became easier to convince herself that she had been overreacting these last two years; reading into actions and gestures that were innocent and not directed toward her. But when Mark grabbed her by the wrist during breakfast Sunday morning and took her to a corner of the room, believing she had been particularly aloof to an older couple from Queens, she could not help but feel that she was being placed in time out by her very own husband. Diana had simply told the man from Queens that she had never had whitefish. But now, Mark’s tight grip on her shoulder erased any kind smile he had thrown her way, reducing Diana to pieces for allowing smiles to convince her everything was fine. She could no longer deny the truth, as much as she wanted to: a couples retreat would not mend their relationship problems, because those issues were buried so far beneath the surface they would likely never be uncovered.

It wasn’t that either of them had cheated or anything. Their families got along well. The two did all the things you would expect of a childless married couple in their thirties: weekend dates, happy hours with friends, outings appropriate with the season. Diana had hiked more times in her life than any sane person needed to. And even though Diana was pretty sure she knew why her marriage was an unhappy one, she still found the whole idea hard to stomach. Not the couples retreat by itself, but the fact that she was nine years into a marriage that had been throwing red flags at her from the very beginning, red flags that she hadn’t picked up on until a couple of years ago, so late into the marriage that Diana was too embarrassed to admit her ignorance up until that point. When had she become a person who closed herself off in their miniscule guest bathroom to do something as innocuous as reading an article on her phone? When had she become an inactive participant in her own life, constantly placing her husband’s desires—and thoughts, and opinions, and goals, and approach to life in general—above her own? When had she become so content with being unhappy? Diana couldn’t deny that

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she had fallen a little less in love with Mark since their marriage. But when had she tricked herself into believing that was an acceptable way to live the rest of her life?

she had been very in love with Mark in the beginning. They met as sophomores in college, and he would bring her banana laffy taffy and stay up all night helping her cram for exams and take her out for real dinners, at restaurants with tablecloths and martinis. Diana was young enough to still think love was a simple act, marriage an agreement you couldn’t back out of. She was idealistic. She watched each of her uncles divorce and remarry and assured herself that would never be her; they had made the wrong decisions. Judged the union incorrectly. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes. To her, marriage was like a math equation; maybe you put a few wrong answers down along the way, but eventually you arrived at the right answer. When she met Mark, she became quickly convinced that the boy who broke up with her by leaving a note on her car the first day of senior year in high school, or the other one who hid in the kitchen while his mom passed on the bad news, or all the other ones before had been the wrong answers. With Mark, she solved the equation.

It wasn’t until she sliced her hand open while pumpkin carving at her brother’s house that she realized something was off. They were seven years into the marriage at that point. Her brother, David, ushered her inside, instructing her to hold her hand up while he located the bandages and Neosporin. “You look like mom,” she remembered observing, then laughing at her own comment, David smirking briefly while he rummaged underneath the kitchen sink. Eventually his boyfriend Thomas emerged from the upstairs bathroom with the first aid kit, yelling about how David did this each time there was an injury, frantically searching the kitchen while Thomas calmly went upstairs to retrieve the kit. They stood on either side of her in their kitchen, taking turns as they bandaged the wound: David cleaning it, Thomas drying it, David applying Neosporin, Thomas wrapping the bandage, reminding her to keep her hand upright. She felt the warmth radiating off the two of them, the undeniable fact that they were a team, a properly solved math equation. She felt almost embarrassed that she had caught herself in the middle of their connection, nearly apologized for that instead of apologizing for bleeding all over their kitchen floor.

“No, no, don’t worry, you’re fine.” Thomas squeezed her shoulder when he said this, and Diana smiled, and it was the warmth of the squeeze, and the selflessness of the smile that made Diana suddenly envious. As she went to rejoin Mark and her brother’s other friends in the backyard, she found herself wanting to scream at her husband, why didn’t you come in and help me? But he instead was engrossed in a conversation with one of David’s friends from work, and it was only when she sat back down next to him, her chair scraping slightly against his, that he glanced harshly in her direction, muttering “are you done?” and then quickly “are you okay?” And before, Diana would have treated this as a slip of the tongue, but she now somehow immediately knew that it wasn’t, that he had intended to say the first phrase. She furrowed her eyebrows and tried to understand what was happening, to navigate the peculiar situation she had suddenly found herself in.

Here’s the thing about pumpkin carving when you have a hand injury: it proved remarkably useful to take stock of everything else going on. Since Mark was now in charge of carving their Stranger Things pumpkin (an idea she had earlier been excited about; now, she thought “how fucking original”), Diana drank her wine and tuned out the conversations and focused on the faces of everyone around her. And she noticed how Mark would smile his best fraternity president smile while he talked to David’s co-worker, but that it stiffened anytime he turned toward Diana, and that each time he gave her his stiff smile, David would leer at Mark, so quickly it was easy to miss, so quick that Diana wondered how many times she had missed it before. She noticed that David and Thomas were the only ones not to laugh whenever Mark shared something he believed humorous, and that Mark was the only one not to laugh when Diana tried to crack a joke, and she knew that couldn’t be coincidental. When they were done carving, and Diana gasped and commented on how good her brother’s Great British Bake Off pumpkin was, Mark seemed to choke down a scoff, before suggesting they share the pumpkins on Instagram to find out who others thought was the winner. David rolled his eyes at this suggestion, to which Mark said, “no, no, it will be fun! I’m sure yours will win!” But the practically murderous look in his eyes implied that he did not want to do this out of fun, and that he would react poorly if, in fact, David’s pumpkin did win, and Diana thought pumpkins, really? She was never sure if the thought was a

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reaction to Mark’s childish resistance to losing, or his determination to be the best even in trivial things, or if it was at herself for having to slice her hand open while pumpkin carving to realize something was seriously off with Mark, seriously off with her marriage.

David and Thomas went inside to get the Halloween-themed cupcakes and Diana slipped in quietly behind them to use the bathroom. They must not have seen her because she stared at herself in the mirror while listening to them whisper about how insufferable Mark was. How they were unsure how Diana put up with him; why she didn’t get out while she could. “I mean, she’s thirty-one,” Thomas whispered. “Still plenty of time to meet someone else and start fresh.” Start fresh? Diana stared at her almond-shaped eyes so long she eventually couldn’t tell which version of herself was doing the staring: the real self or the mirror self. David, who was a groomsman in their wedding, who let Diana carry him around like he was a pet cat when they were children, who followed Diana to DC, didn’t object to Thomas’s thinking. Instead, he agreed. He said he would help her, even.

They didn’t stay for much longer, Diana practically swallowing a cupcake whole, Mark glaring at her until she realized she had frosting on her cheeks, and she wiped it off, quickly, before returning her gaze to Mark, who was chatting to the co-worker, again. Diana wanted to scream. What, are you recruiting him? Are you trying to get him to fall in love? Their pumpkins all now sat in a corner of the patio and the longer Diana looked at them, the more menacing they became, the more she wanted to raise a foot high and smash them all to pieces.

David and Thomas gave her long hugs as they left, and she joked, “What, are we not seeing each other again?” They laughed, but the sickly feeling in her stomach told her she knew why they were hugging her extra long. How many other times had she received an equivalently long hug without realizing it?

Growing up, her father always teased her for being the last one in on a joke. “It just takes you longer to put it together, that’s all,” he would say, squeezing her shoulders. “But that’s what makes you you. It just takes you a few minutes to put the pieces together.” Leaving her brother’s house that night, she wondered how long she had not been in on the joke. How long had David and Thomas leered at Mark? How long had Mark acted as if every single move of Diana’s was a personal embarrassment to him? In their twelve years as a couple, how much had she missed? diana told one person the truth of their weekend getaway, and when Prisha asked how the couples retreat was, Diana pushed aside the therapy sessions and early morning yoga and tower of muffins and instead told her about the burning truck. When Prisha expressed shock, having not seen anything on the news, Diana Googled the incident on her work computer, turning its screen toward Prisha, who peered over the top of her cubicle to read the article, her mouth gaping at the pictures.

She and Prisha had started working at Girls First at the same time four years prior, a nonprofit that promoted female empowerment in local public schools. Diana soon realized that it was very easy to describe what the organization did, but hard to actually put ideas into action. There was always a parent who disagreed with their message—haven’t we already shown girls they can be whatever they want to be?—or who didn’t see the value in educating young students on things such as sexual violence and abusive relationships and how to advocate for yourself in the workforce. The conundrum was simple enough to work around: the idea that middle schoolers were too young for these messages, yet high schoolers had already received this information. Their director spent chunks of her day calmly explaining that we couldn’t assume high schoolers were receiving these messages from their parents, that the label change from middle to high schooler didn’t mean the girls were any less naïve. She was an astute woman in her early forties who wore pink blazers purposefully to confuse any male executives she had to go to battle with. Diana had read about the organization in the Washingtonian and applied on a whim; she went from teaching high school students to crafting lesson plans on things like “Being your Boldest Self.”

Diana shared the truth of her weekend with Prisha because she was the person she spent most of her time with, even more than her husband. The sad, accepted truth of desk jobs in the twenty-first century. If Prisha had a lighter sense of humor, Diana would joke that Prisha was her “work wife.” But Prisha, by default, was stern, hardened by years of correcting colleagues who added an extra syllable to her name, no matter how long they worked together; by dates that insisted on asking

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where she was “really from,” only for her to tell them she grew up in Philadelphia. Prisha had met Mark a handful of times, and, at their most recent work happy hour, Mark became obsessive at making Prisha laugh over a string of stories about his uncle that Diana had heard countless times. It wasn’t until he was on his third drink that he realized Diana had moved to the other side of the bar, half listening to another coworker complain about her dog’s recent trip to the groomer. He held Diana’s elbow tightly as they walked home, only waiting until they were inside their house to unleash how embarrassing it was for him to be left alone talking to Prisha. Diana, slightly buzzed from several gin & tonics, asked “Embarrassing for who?” before making her way upstairs. Knowing it would irk him, she dropped her purse on the bottom step. A second self had made its presence known after the pumpkin carving and when it showed up in moments like this—acting out through small, petty gestures, rather than taking a sledgehammer to their entire relationship to see what was salvageable—Diana knew the second self had been waiting for her attention for a very long time.

When she first told Prisha about the retreat, she hadn’t said what her mother would have if she had told her—“Good for you, commitment is so important”—before yelling at her father that she wasn’t going to show him where the TV remote was one more goddamned time. Instead, she asked if Diana had ever thought about leaving him.

The question was simple, and Prisha’s gaze on hers implied that, somewhere within those casual happy hours with Mark, she picked up on what everyone else had all along but had never bothered to mention to Diana. But unlike her family, who apparently decided long ago that stuffing the truth deep inside was the kindest option, Prisha decided to lay the truth out, where Diana could no longer hide from it. In years prior, she would have laughed in Prisha’s face, would have told her she was being ridiculous, would have blown up in anger. But now, the wiser self couldn’t pretend to be surprised at the question, even though she wanted to, and she coughed nervously instead of answering, the whole interaction leaving Diana feeling sticky and doubtful.

Looking at the fire photos with Prisha—the fire that she could still see burning inside of her—Diana felt that same sticky feeling return, a vastness opening. She could practically feel the rocks breaking loose and tumbling away underneath her feet, the valley of air patiently waiting to grab her tightly and suck her into the depths below. the truck fire was distraction enough that Prisha didn’t press Diana for more information on the couples retreat until mid-afternoon, when they were huddled next to the coffee station. Many of their Girls First lesson plans emphasized reflection as a way to spark growth. In her past life as a teacher, she had made the same speech to her students countless times but often found herself struggling to abide by the practice. She had barely reflected on the weekend at all. She was instead wondering how often cars caught on fire. To satiate her friend’s questioning, she murmured, “It was fine. Didn’t fix everything but we learned a lot,” and turned to walk her coffee back to her desk, wondering how much longer she could maintain the lie. that night, however, a memory of the weekend shook itself loose and suddenly Diana was consumed by it, opening her eyes against the dark bedroom, shifting from almost asleep to fully awake at dizzying speed. Mark was snoring next to her, and she realized the snoring itself was what caused the memory to dislodge.

Late Saturday night, Diana had found Mark’s snoring unbearable and grabbed her cell phone and went for a walk.

The couples retreat was at a stately bed & breakfast near Woodbury, a place that looked prepared to host dignitaries and ambassadors and not slouching couples hoping to avoid divorce. Diana was glad to find no one at the front desk and greeted the nighttime air greedily, the day’s heat still thick in the air.

The spa and pool buildings, the tennis court, and the mass of cars quickly gave way to a thick, densely packed forest. They had walked through part of it earlier that day during a group therapy session, and Diana believed she could still hear the twigs and leaves crunching beneath their feet as they walked in an obedient single line, observing the therapist’s instruction to remain “silent and observe.” And Diana had observed, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she had always been good at following instructions. She thought of how her mother often picked early spring flowers before they died in the next

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freeze, once getting cursed out by a stranger who didn’t understand her intention. She was only trying to preserve their beauty before the late stages of winter gobbled them up again. Diana considered breaking the silence to share this story, Mark’s imagined response filling her with a strange sort of glee. It was hard for her to imagine that Mark was truly trying to improve their relationship to ensure they were both happy; she couldn’t shake the feeling that the decision to attend a couples retreat was good only for appearances. That Mark only cared about what the outcomes would show others. At his core, he was still the fraternity president, trying to ensure a shiny surface while the inside slowly rotted.

She should have asked him, during the therapy session, “Am I still just an accomplishment, a trophy for you to shine and bring out on special occasions? Did you forget to break up with me after college, after I could no longer serve you and your fraternity’s image as the impressive scholarship student and now you’ve found yourself years deep into a marriage, unsure what to do next?” Because even though she had dropped the role of “president’s girlfriend” long ago, he still considered himself a president, of sorts, with all the expectations that came with the title.

She followed the curve of the road, which dipped to the left. The lights of the B&B were suddenly extinguished, the line of trees consuming her in the darkness. Diana felt her heart quicken but she wasn’t afraid. The moon was out, and she knocked her head back to take in the stars. She relished the absence of people, the absence of voices, the countless stars that she so rarely saw in the city, greeting each one like an old acquaintance.

A twig snapped, and Diana kept walking with her head knocked back, assured in her footing on the smooth road. She did not wonder if Mark had woken up or worry about his reaction if he had. She let the heat glide over her like a new layer of skin, luxuriously bathing in the sickly stickiness, and it was only when she heard another twig snap, this time closer, that she looked straight again, already knowing that she was no longer alone.

The new presence was invisible in the dark, but nonetheless perceptible. Diana could hear it moving slowly in the nighttime air, imagining the heat parting around it like an endless curtain. Her heart started to race. She remembered an article on why rapists target runners, back when she used to be a jogger herself; the ponytails were easy to yank. She touched her own ponytail, her dark hair frizzy from the humidity. Fumbling, she turned on her phone’s flashlight and moved in a darting circle, hoping to catch the predator before he caught her.

When she finally saw the eyes, she had already accepted her fate. But the longer she looked, creeping slowly backwards, she realized the eyes were much lower to the ground, wide and yellow. They were unmoving and detached from whatever they belonged to and, for a moment, she stopped, thinking if she concentrated long enough that she would be able to make out the rest of the body; make out the thing that was waiting to kill her. She considered moving close enough so that the flashlight consumed the darkness, rather than the other way around, in order to bring the body into full exposure. The eyes were practically sparkling from the light and Diana’s breathing momentarily slowed, utterly mesmerized. But then whatever it was took one silent step forward, the eyes increasing in size, and she stumbled before jogging back toward the B&B, occasionally checking behind her to find the creature had not moved, was not moving, and she greeted the lights and electrical hum of the inn with a great, heaving sigh, practically shaking when she finally reached the front doors.

The B&B was silent, not a soul in sight, and Diana was momentarily consumed with the belief that she had stepped into some alternate dimension, left alone to survive on her own devices. This wasn’t a new idea of hers; ever since reading an article on mysterious disappearances in national parks, she was overcome with the conviction that that very thing was going to happen to her one day. That she would lose sight of any hiking partners and emerge to find herself somewhere else entirely, forever separated from those she knew. Plucked away into someone else’s world. Sometimes she didn’t think that would be too bad. Maybe the other Mark in the new dimension wouldn’t be so high strung.

But tonight she reached for something familiar, in order to help her organize her thoughts. She sighed with relief when she reached the room and opened the door to Mark’s snoring.

She locked the door and slid down to sitting, holding her forehead in her hands. She couldn’t quite grasp what she was feeling. It was something greater than fear—a concept that, by its nature, signified

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conformity. She often found herself unafraid of things others feared the most, firm in her belief that what people really feared was not the actual thing itself, but the unknown. And now, as she caught her breath and relived the encounter, she was not afraid of whatever she had seen. Something else was growing inside of her; the unsettling feeling that she had come face to face with not her death, but her equal. Herself in another form. She closed her eyes and imagined she could hear it moving slowly through the hallway, waiting until it sensed her on the other side.

She never told Mark, knowing that he would focus instead on her leaving the room late at night and how that would look to others. She knew he would find some way to write off what she had seen; that it was probably a raccoon, or an opossum, or even a deer, but Diana knew the creature was none of those things. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it was an entirely new species, something unnamable. Something that did not yet clearly signal fear or curiosity or innocence.

Their row house was quiet. The street was, for once, quiet. She slipped out of bed and slowly rolled up their shades, taking in the street below. The neat line of cars, trees thick with leaves. The hair on her arms prickled, and she imagined any number of places the animal, if it was indeed an animal, could be at this very moment. Alone in its Connecticut forest; hidden away in a pack; walking down her city street; waiting on the other side of her bedroom door. Quietly breathing, ready for the inevitable.

when diana brought mark to meet her parents for the first time, the first thing her mother said to her when they were alone was: “He sure smiles a lot, doesn’t he?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her mother held her hands up, defensive. “I’m just pointing it out, it’s a lot of smiling. Who needs to smile that much? You can’t even tell what he’s thinking from all that smiling.”

“He’s probably just nervous.”

Diana’s mother looked shocked at this, her mouth gaping open. “What’s he have to be nervous about? We’re the ones who should be nervous.” They were in the kitchen preparing coffee, Mark and Diana’s father in the living room. Diana could hear Mark laughing and wondered what her father thought about another man laughing so much and so purposefully. Her brother, still in high school, had politely shaken Mark’s hand before darting down the back stairs to meet friends. Everyone was civil. Everyone was polite, talkative, some more than others, sure. And was it so hard to believe that Mark was nervous?

Diana’s mother pulled out a tin of wedding cookies and, even though she loved them—and knew Mark would love to hear the story of how her father squirreled some away for himself each time a new batch appeared—she felt a twinge of embarrassment, thinking of the elaborate dessert Mark’s family had provided when she met them for the first time. A delicately decorated chocolate cake, Diana dropping some of the dark frosting on the new dress Mark had bought her for the occasion. At first, she had found the gift thrilling, the very idea that a boy wanted to buy something so nice for her, but now, as she looked around her parents’ crowded, dated kitchen, she considered that the dress might have been more than just a nice gesture. He was from a tight-knit, waspy Connecticut family; her parents, both from sprawling Italian families, had grown up next to each other in Cambridge, in thin row houses that had been in their families for decades. Didn’t that bring its own kind of status, its own kind of wealth? They were both born and raised in New England, but might as well have been worlds apart, for the way Mark referenced their childhoods.

During the remainder of the evening, Diana studied Mark’s smile. She was right; he had loved the story about the wedding cookies, and smiled as she told it, and smiled as her mother explained the significance of the wedding cookies to their family, and smiled when David came home, and smiled while he talked about his fraternity’s volunteer efforts for breast cancer research, and smiled during every embarrassing story about Diana’s childhood, and, by the end of the night, Diana marveled that he still had enough muscular energy to keep a smile on his face. Later, much later, she would ponder the similarities between a smile and a grimace, how it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other.

Leave it to her mother to find smiling untrustworthy. Her family accepted Mark, not because they had to, but because they wanted to, for Diana’s sake. If acceptance had been required, she wasn’t sure, now, if the marriage would have made it past the first hurdle. Years into the mar-

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riage, Diana knew her mother still stuck by her original assessment of her now husband, that the smiling was, as she put it, “covering up for something. It just makes me a little wary, that’s all. What’s he hiding behind all those teeth?” when had she become someone who Googled wild animals in Connecticut? Who clicked through pages of comment boards of people debating the likelihood of a wild animal caring about you enough to not only pick up your scent, but track it across state lines? b1rdsRlyfe said, “lmao that’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” and Diana poised her hands over her keyboard, prepared to write back, “you didn’t see this animal, you can’t have known what it felt like.” But Diana really hadn’t seen the animal either, just the eyes, and that alone had been enough to stick her hair on end.

Diana didn’t have an answer, because she didn’t know how to communicate that, when it was just the two of them, he rarely smiled for her like he smiled for others.

Prisha stuck her head over their shared cubicle wall to tell her she had seen a report that the burning truck had been a marijuana truck, a company that sold weed candies to college students. Diana quickly closed her open web browser, wondering how b1rdsRlyfe would respond to that news. Lmao best contact high ever. “I forgot about the fire,” Diana said, and she was surprised to realize this was true. The thing that had consumed her sleep two days prior was now replaced by the other, more unknowable force. In the morning, awake before Mark, Diana had checked all the closets in their house, sure the creature was hiding in some barely used crevice. When Mark found her digging behind the washing machine, she murmured something about lost socks.

After the pumpkin carving, after the realization, Diana thought a lot about her two selves. Which self was it that encountered this mysterious presence in the forest? Was it the same one who swooned the first time she and Mark kissed? Or the one who faltered when he told her he loved her for the first time and she only said it back after noticing the tense crowding of his eyebrows, the disapproval on his face, giving her the same feeling she had whenever she got a question wrong on a test? Was it the one who cried when he proposed, on top of the Empire

State Building at sunrise? Or the one who joked about making out with strange boys at her bachelorette party and only didn’t go through it because her high school best friend said, “you do you, but that’s probably a bad idea.” Even then, she knew her desire to kiss other boys wasn’t a great sign.

But still. She had made promises. She couldn’t just quit a marriage. Quitting a marriage meant moving back in with her parents, which is what both of her uncles did after their divorces until they moved into a place together, which didn’t seem any better of an option. So after that Halloween, Diana decided if there was a problem in their marriage, then it must be her fault. Mark was too concerned with maintaining his nice fraternity boy image to cause problems he couldn’t fix, which Diana later realized was a naïve assumption. At the time, though, she focused on picking up on Mark’s clues. She was too loud, too clumsy, too disruptive, too aloof, too in your face. Apparently. She needed to be more considerate of others, more aware of others’ feelings, more focused on making a good impression. All the time. Even to strangers. Strangers, really? Diana had thought at first, and then fumed at Mark nearly breaking his neck to make a server laugh but then ignoring her on the walk home, his hand so tightly grasped around hers that it left fingernail impressions in her skin.

But still Diana tried. And the more she fought to be the good wife, the more her other self pushed back. The more her brother made his disapproval obvious, the more Diana panicked at having miscalculated her marriage equation so poorly, so off the charts wrong, that the only option out was to admit failure. And when Mark suggested a couples retreat, Diana thought finally, all her efforts had paid off, until Mark made it clear that the retreat was to address her contributions to the marriage, which he called “problematic,” and Diana felt her other self bursting at the seams to be released, to take control, but she was determined. Maybe this was the thing that would fix everything.

And that was the last thing she remembered thinking when she suddenly found herself at a McDonald’s, the cashier crying, a manager demanding Diana apologize, and Diana looked at the money in her hand that she didn’t remember pulling out of her purse and tried to decide if it was better to hand over the “I’m sorry” or admit she didn’t know

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what she would be apologizing for. She looked out the window and saw blinding lightness, an expansive parking lot, the highway stretching away in the distance. She saw her husband closing their car door, consternation on his face as he made his way to the entrance. She felt her stomach fill with dread, heard the manager screaming to others that she had called the cashier fat, and even though Diana knew she never would have said that, that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, she tried to quickly apologize before Mark overheard, before the incident bloomed into something else entirely. But it was too late, and Mark snatched the money out of her hand and apologized, smiling his best smile, and then Mark gripped her elbow and ushered her out to the car and she asked, “what about the order,” even though she couldn’t remember what she had ordered and, besides, what she really wanted to say was, “I think I’m floating,” her head threatening to detach itself from her body and vanish. Exhaustion was heavy in her ears, and she watched as Mark navigated back toward the interstate, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, a sign screaming “Welcome to Connecticut” and she said, out loud, “Oh, right, the couples retreat,” to which Mark punched the steering wheel several times in quick succession, each punch turning into a beep of his car horn. When he stopped, he looked flustered, and anxious, and Diana asked, demurely, “Do you think we should apologize to the car in front of us now, too?” she knew now—she had always known—that the question Prisha should have asked was “why hasn’t he left you?” Why marry someone to be your trophy wife when they so clearly and repeatedly and fastidiously failed all of the requirements? Why pretend the world was yours to operate on, that partners, no matter how in love with you they had been in the beginning, were yours for the controlling?

Another truth, that she hadn’t shared with Prisha, was that she and Mark had seen another car on fire once. It was early in their relationship, living off H Street, equal distance to Mark’s classes at Georgetown Law and her first teaching job in Shaw. They used part of their income to take weekend trips, driving to Philadelphia and Dewey Beach, New York City and Annapolis and once, when they were feeling particularly adventurous, to Niagara Falls. Diana remembered the enormous gush of water tugging at her, how she eyed the waterfall with something akin to lust. walking home from work, Diana wondered if she should have given more attention to things like that. A week had passed since the couples retreat. She crossed the street at almost every intersection, unable to shake the feeling that something was following her, making her way home in a never-ending zigzag. Each time she turned around, she only saw other commuters behind her, but that didn’t stop her from feeling convinced that whatever it was she was searching for would break through the crowd at any moment, throwing the street into chaos.

Diana wasn’t sure if Mark remembered seeing the other car on fire. They were twenty-four and driving to New York City at Christmastime, two years before they got married. Diana was excited for the Rockefeller Tree, the Christmas villages spread out across the city; it had never taken much to please her. She had no idea Mark intended to propose the next morning, during their sunrise visit to the Empire State Building. Diana was too young, too excitable at that time to really see anything other than for what it was, but when they saw the car on fire on the side of the road, just north of Baltimore, her breath caught in her throat. She was driving and it took everything in her to keep her eyes on the road, to not stop cold at the fact that the car burning was identical to hers, color and all. Diana felt her heart quicken in a way she didn’t recognize and found herself urgently checking the driver’s side as they passed parallel, almost positive she’d see herself staring back.

Mark had murmured “shit” as they passed the car, but by the time he proposed to Diana the next morning, sunlight blinking off the hundreds of metal buildings and skyscrapers, they both had forgotten about the whole thing, turning their attention to the future.

Mark was already home, reading a brief at the dining table. His palms were on his forehead, fingers tangled in his hair, and she watched him as she took off her shoes, hung her bag by the front door. One could reason that Mark’s temperamental attitude was due to his job, a lawyer specializing in insurance recovery litigation, but Diana had always felt that would give him too much benefit of the doubt. Why should he be given every consideration or excuse where the same would not be given to her

katherine joshi

if the roles were reversed? She refused to believe work-based excuses, especially the ones that came from men. She knew from her mother alone that women could handle whatever the world threw at them, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. It was time, had been time, for men to step up and stop making excuses for how difficult the world was for them, because the world had always been difficult. They were just getting an easier ride for a while.

Diana’s heart was racing; she could practically feel the blood moving through her body. She figured, by this point, that the creature must be paused on the other side of the door, calculating an alternative way to enter the house. She sat down opposite Mark, who had not looked up since she arrived, and remained still for a moment even after Diana asked, “Remember the other time we saw a car on fire?”

It took a moment, but eventually Mark pulled his hands out of his hair, briefly looking up at Diana. “What?”

“We were driving to New York.” She had subconsciously started twisting her engagement ring. “The trip we got engaged.”

No look of recollection covered Mark’s face but he said “Oh, right,” nonetheless, sitting back in his chair. Diana remembered their first years married, when they both put work aside at night to watch a movie, drink wine, sit in their backyard during the warmer months, the smell of their jasmine plants thick in the air. Diana honestly wasn’t sure if Mark’s work had become more demanding, or if he just preferred it to her; she had never asked and he had never volunteered the information. As with most transitions, it was gradual, Diana realizing how their evenings had changed when it was already too late.

She couldn’t pretend to be blameless, though. She hadn’t shied away from the hours she suddenly had to herself, the two of them feet apart but practically living in different universes.

Mark had already turned back to his work. Diana got up, poured two glasses of wine, placing one next to Mark. He murmured a thank you but didn’t look in her direction; instead, he carefully moved the wine far from his papers, an action that told Diana everything she needed to know. She thought about knocking the glass over, watching stoically as the wine spread across the papers. She thought about opening all the doors and windows to see if the creature that had been following her would finally make its way inside. Instead, she slurped her glass down, already finishing it by the time she made it upstairs. She would return for another glass, and then a third; again, later, to check all the closets, to open the back door and stare into their tiny backyard, waiting, hoping even, for something to return her gaze. ◆

katherine joshi