Well, the truth, then: “A girl gave me a blow job last night.” What could Ana possibly say? In all the scenarios he played out in his head, she did what she did best—she left.

Right after James moved into Ana’s apartment, when she was amassing a wardrobe of blazers and carrying around a gigantic black leather Filofax, James had run into an old girlfriend in a bar. That night Ana had stayed home to get up early for work, but James was barely working then, teaching just one unpopular class, on Aristotle. The small, dark club had no chairs and a band, two guys, one on bass, one on guitar. It sounded awful, and drinking more didn’t alter that fact. Then Catherine appeared, oh Catherine with the baby bangs and the cigarette tongue, and the T-shirt spilling over with flesh right along the pink scoop neck. As a girlfriend, she had been dumb but untroubled, up for anything in bed. She was a type of girl that James was always meeting, with a clerical job in an art gallery and ideas the size of peas, which she reiterated up against the bar: “I’m doing these paintings about the body, uh, about how men were always painting the body but now, like, I’m a woman painting the body …” He had nodded and imagined peeling off her T-shirt, getting her to bend this way and that. A few more beers and she was running her hand along the inside of his thigh (Did she remember how that killed him, or was it a generic move, available to all? He decided not to be bothered either way.), and then they were upon each other in the bathroom. He was actually fucking in a bathroom stall! The thrill of fulfilling this cinematic objective lasted for about eighteen seconds, and then he began to question the initiator. Only an artist as bad as Catherine would fail to recognize this event for the creative cliché it was. And also, in fact, uncomfortable—she was a little tall for him—and when he glanced down and saw the cigarette butt floating in the yellow water of the toilet, James had to close his eyes to finish.

When he got home, Ana was asleep. James was wearing the paramedic shirt he always wore in those days. He buried it at the bottom of the laundry basket.

After a long, scrubbing shower, he emerged and stood naked above his new girlfriend asleep on the mattress, the first real bed he had bought in his adult life, after years on futons on floors. And she had helped him achieve this milestone. He took in the exposed brick walls of the loft and Ana’s briefcase leaning by the door, her red leather gloves across the top, the empty fingers flopping gently. He could feel in that moment that they had already begun their ascent, that they were unmoored and lifting toward adulthood, and she had chosen him to accompany her, he who would have stayed on the ground, in the filth, forever. She had chosen him, and he had rewarded her with this, the crassest kind of betrayal, one involving toilet paper and an unsigned band.

And so he woke her, and confessed every detail, and wept and wept, naked on the bed. Ana lay frozen, nodding from time to time. He told her he was filled with shame, that he had always been filled with shame, and that he needed her to remind him to be good. Ana lay there, expressionless, asking only one, unanswerable thing: “What do you mean?”

The sun broke through, and Ana rose for her shower. When she came out of the bathroom, she was already fully dressed and made up.

“If it matters to hear me say it, I would never do it again,” said James from under the duvet, as Ana gathered her keys, put on her jacket. She thought of her mother, of the weeping. She had no memory of her father leaving, just her mother flailing in his wake.

She turned to James.

“Okay,” she said.

Because it seemed appropriate, James nodded fiercely.

He spent the next days trying to revive Ana. Her eyes flattened, and she would go for hours without talking, even as they continued their routine as if nothing had happened. From the moment they awoke, James talked. He talked through her silence at breakfast, her quiet sips of wine at the pub after work. “You picked the wrong guy if you think I’m going to run out of things to say,” said James, folding laundry and talking about baseball, C. S. Lewis, Rodney King. He thought she was weighing whether or not her “Okay” was sincere, and that was when he knew that he could not have a life without her, that such a future would be entirely without purpose. So he talked, hoping some of his words would hook and reel her in.

Ana had arrived to him, at age twenty-six, exhausted by the needs of those who claimed to love her. She no longer wanted to be tired out by the folly of others. James knew how her father had vanished literally, and her mother vanished nightly into the drink. He knew her teenage days stopped at 10 p.m., when she shut her door and put on headphones to drown out the rattle and rant of her mother on the telephone or cackling in the living room with a new friend. And in the morning, when the sunlight hit the African violets, Ana felt optimistic again and was eager to bring her mother back to the world, carrying her a tray of Tylenol and tea.

Later, Ana tended to boys who loved her only part of the time, too. She might stitch a torn sleeve, or show up on the doorstep with the right album, but even a fuck in some vacationing parents’ bedroom was never enough to keep the full attention of these sleepy-eyed lovers. They left.

But James would be present. James wouldn’t take advantage. James promised to fill this vacant building from which all the people who had promised to love Ana had fled. He knew that she couldn’t sustain any more betrayal. And three weeks after he had sex in the bar bathroom, he awoke to Ana’s eyes on him. They were her real eyes at last. “Never again,” she said, and James held her so tight he left a faint yellow bruise on the back of her left shoulder.

This was their covenant, then. It seemed to James that there were things he needed to keep from her, and that she had asked him to do so, in fact. And now, driving to his parents’ house, he tried to convince himself that not telling her about his weakness and terrible mistakes was a gesture akin to love. He told himself this while attempting to ignore the rotten stench floating up from his guts.

“Where doggy?” asked Finn.

“He didn’t come with us, Finny,” said James. Ana opened her eyes, saw a mall before her, closed them again, her headache rotating.

And then it began. Finn started to snarl, and the snarl begat a kind of bark that was actually a cry, a sob, a wracking of body, a flailing of legs, small, strong feet pounding into James’s back as he drove.

“Dogggyyyyy!” he wailed through a wall of sobs and screams.

“Finn, don’t kick me! I’m driving!”

A huge truck went by James’s window, too fast, too close. He swerved, and bodies thrust forward and back.

“James!” said Ana, clutching her side.

“Doggyyyy! Want him! Want him! Want him!”

Ana’s stomach bounced up and down. She put one hand over her belly, one on the top of her head, holding both in place.

“Doggyyyy!”

“Make him stop,” whispered Ana.

“What?”

“Make him stop!”

“Doggyyyy!”

“What can I do?” shouted James.

“Just do your thing! Just do it!” Bile rose in her throat; she choked it back.

“Finny—just stop it. We’ll get the dog later,” shouted James.

Finn seemed to regard the words as a challenge, ramping up the volume, the kicking. James felt Finn’s snot and spit flying in droplets through the car.

James took the next exit, following the signs to Tim Horton’s.

“Are you coming?” he asked Ana from the backseat, unstrapping the flailing body. She nodded, trying to unlock the door.

“Drugstore,” she said, feeling her throat, parched and burning.

“Maybe you could fucking help me,” he said, but Ana didn’t hear him.

They split off from each other, then, Ana retreating to the relative calm of the small pharmacy in the strip mall. She bought a box of cold medicine, throat lozenges, a large bottle of water.