He said, “Sylvia?” His quizzical tone carried no righteousness, only the fatigue and pain of his day. We lay very still, hardly breathing, bodies without mass or contour, dissolving, becoming the darkness. From his tone, from his one word, “Sylvia,” I read his mind, understood his anguish. She’d done painful things before. He didn’t want to prove to himself that she was in the apartment. He’d go stomping away down the hall.
