Things We Set on Fire

by Deborah Reed

She massaged her forehead, propped the book back up on her chest, but couldn’t read. On their third date Rudi told her she seemed too “patrician” to come from the family she’d described, and when he said this he studied her hair and eyes, the scarf around her neck. She loved hearing him say that. It confirmed what she’d believed all along, that she didn’t belong to those people, and never had. Instead of connecting Elin with her past, Rudi had marveled at the way she’d pulled herself out of it like a diamond from the rough. She was the sparkly gem he protected with an umbrella on the street after dinner, whispering that he was falling in love with her, and she whispered the same. Maybe the rain tapping the umbrella, the steam rising from wet concrete, the fine Pinot Noir warming their blood, had all served as a setting for love, a mood mistaken for the thing itself, romancing them into believing in each other when they were really nothing more than actors caught up in a scene. Maybe one had believed and the other had not. Seven years they’d been married. The seven-year itch. Was Poppy Rudi’s itch? Elin searched for a clue that something had been off, revealed in increments over time, like tiny fissures, virtually unnoticeable but for the cumulative effect on the whole. All right. There was a loneliness, a silence that had crept into the bathroom after they made love, the way they no longer looked at one another beneath the vanity light, just wiped themselves clean, no laug...