The rule she'd given herself, walking back from the window, was that she would open one box today. She had been giving herself the rule for nine days, and the count was still zero.

Two boxes left, stacked in the spare room David had waved a hand at on moving day — for whatever you want it to be, sweetheart — with the generosity of a man offering something he believed cost him nothing. She had not called the room her office. She had not called it anything. The door had no name on it, the way the folder in her phone had no name on it, and she was beginning to suspect the two unnamed places were talking to each other behind her back.

She knelt on the floor. S. DESK, in her own handwriting, in the fat red marker she'd lifted from a meeting at Mercer & Hale and forgotten she owned. The tape peeled back with a sound like a held breath releasing. Inside, set carefully so it wouldn't slide, lay a coffee mug with the press's small black logo and a chipped lip, and standing upright in it, three pens. A fine-tip Pilot. A blue Pentel that had died years ago. And the red one. The one she had used for six years.

She lifted it out. The barrel was warm from the cardboard. The cap was scored where her teeth had worn it down over long afternoons. She held it the way her hand remembered — weighted at the second knuckle — and a small motion happened in her wrist that was older than her marriage, the slight rotation that had always meant I am about to mark.

For a moment she was a person again. A person with a tool in her hand that she was the best in the room at using.

Then she heard, in memory, David's voice across a dinner three weeks ago telling Dr. Petersen that his wife used to be an editor, used to live in all that, that she was resting now, and she set the pen down on the bright grain of the floor and watched its small clean shadow the way she used to draw a margin against a line.

She made herself pick it up again. She would not let him have the wrist too. He had taken the days of the week, and the temperature of the rooms, and the names of the trees behind her grandmother's porch, which she would have sworn last spring were one thing and now could not swear were not another. He had taken the verb tenses she used about her own work — everything she was, filed back into used to. He had not taken the wrist yet. The wrist still knew its one true motion. She rotated it, slowly, in the bright morning angle, and the red pen drew its small clean line of shadow across the floor, and for the space of that line she was thirty years old and the best in any room at the one thing she did.

Under the mug: a stack of marked-up galleys she'd photocopied for her own files, a Chicago Manual broken at chapter five, the canvas tote she'd carried out of the office on her last day, heavier going out than coming in. She set the red pen on the desk, alone, where she would see it, and she opened her laptop and typed her old editor-in-chief's name into a blank message.

Marianne, she wrote. The refrigerator's compressor cycled in the dead-still kitchen. I wanted to ask whether there might be any copyediting work — I've moved out of the city, as you know, but that kind of project always lived in PDF and email anyway, and I have time again, and I have, I think, the —

She stopped. As you know. The phrase apologized three times in two words: it assumed her own irrelevance, softened the ask before she'd made it, set her at the edge of someone else's busy desk. She had once been the woman who deleted that exact phrase out of other people's sentences.

She deleted it. She deleted the line before it. She deleted the salutation, and then she closed the laptop the way you set down a borrowed instrument you've decided not to play, and she hated how relieved she felt.

But she kept the email. She didn't delete the draft. It sat in the folder, unsent, three sentences and a hanging dash, and it was the most dangerous thing she had done in nine weeks, and she knew it, and she left it there.

At six forty-one David came home, two beats in the hall — right shoe, then left, always in that order — and the apartment reordered itself around him. He kissed her temple. Antiseptic, and the faint cedar of the soap from the surgeons' locker room.

"You ate?"

"I made the chicken. It's resting."

"Good," he said. "Good. Good." He said it three times when he wanted her to feel met.

They sat. He told her about a knee, a fellow who'd asked the wrong question in rounds. She made the small sounds and did not lift her water glass until he lifted his, a thing she'd started doing without deciding to and had only lately noticed she did.

"How was your day?"

"Quiet. I opened a box. Some desk things."

He chewed for the full length of the bite, set his fork parallel to his knife, and laid his hand flat on the table beside hers. "Have you thought about freelance," he said. It had the shape of a question with the inflection surgically removed.

"I've thought about it."

"You don't have to. I want you back at it because you want it, not because you think I —"

"No. I know."

"You'll know when you're ready. Marianne has twenty editors. She's not going anywhere. That kind of work waits." He smiled. "It always waits."

She did not tell him she had written three sentences to Marianne that morning and saved them. She had learned which of her own facts to keep, the way you learn which floorboards give.

Later, in the dark, she watched him cross from the bathroom carrying something small. She heard a soft click of plastic on wood — set down not on his side of the bed, but on hers.

"What's that?"

The lamp came on. He angled it toward her: a second hygrometer, palm-sized, a little grey number glowing on its face. "For your sinuses," he said. "Picked it up at the pharmacy."

She had not mentioned her sinuses. She could not remember the last time she had thought the word sinuses in her own head. But here it was, an instrument on her side of the bed, measuring something about her she had not asked to have measured, set there by the man who set the thermostat to sixty-eight when it already read sixty-eight. The lamp clicked off. The little number glowed in the dark beside her head — forty-one — and did not move, and she lay on her back and understood, with the cold clarity that came to her sometimes at night, that she now slept beside a device whose only job was to know more about the air she breathed than she did.

She did not sleep. Toward two she got up for water she did not want, only to be in a room without the small glowing number in it.

In the dark living room she went to the curtain. She did not pull it open. She lifted the corner.

The bookshop was dark, the green awning a black scallop under the streetlight, the plate glass a slab of reflected lamp. But there was a light on at the back — a single low bulb over the counter — and as she watched, the tall man came forward through his own shop in shirtsleeves, carrying a book.

He stopped at the window display. He took a book that had been lying flat, spine up, and he turned it. He stood it upright, face-out, against the others, so the cover showed to the street — to the dark street, at two in the morning, when there was no one to show it to.

No one but a woman who kept her own curtain drawn and lifted the corner of it when she couldn't sleep.

He didn't look up this time. He set the book square, adjusted it a half-inch, and went back through his shop and turned off the low bulb, and the window went dark, and the cover was just a pale rectangle she could no longer read.

But she had read it before he turned off the light. She had read it the way she read everything — fast, complete, against her will. A slim grey hardback, a small serif title she knew in her teeth, a press she had once known. She had marked the dedication page of that book on a Saturday morning in March, three years ago, with a pencil tick beside a comma that was not a comma. She had taken coffee with the author at a bagel shop on Eighth Avenue the following Tuesday and said something that had made him laugh.

She had edited that book.

She knew it the way you know your own handwriting on an envelope across a room. She knew the dedication, two lines, for my mother, who read first. She knew the typo on page two-eleven that had survived three passes and shamed her still — a led that should have been a lead — the one error in six years she could not forgive herself, and which no one else on earth would ever notice. The author had thanked her in the acknowledgments by her full name. Sarah Calloway. Her own name, before it had folded itself down into sweetheart and you and the woman who got the dip after a big transition. It sat in that grey book in the dark window, in print, where David could not reach in and reset it to sixty-eight.

Of every title in his shop, of the hundreds of spines on the dark shelves, he had stood up, at two in the morning, the one with her invisible fingerprints on every page — and turned it to face her window.

It could be coincidence. It could be a man tidying a display he'd meant to fix all day. The editor in her listed the innocent explanations the way she'd once listed an author's defensible commas, and then, with a small terrified lift under her ribs, she let the list go.

It was not coincidence. He had looked at her this morning across thirty-two feet and found her. And tonight he had found the one book in his shop that belonged to her and stood it up in the window like a hand raised across a crowded, silent room.

I see you there, the morning had said.

This said: I know who you are.

She let the curtain fall and stood in the dark with her heart going hard and her water glass forgotten on the sill, and for the length of one long breath she was not a scattered woman with anxiety she was meant to watch. She was a copy editor named Sarah who had once made a comma right, and a stranger across the street had read the whole of her from that single comma, and had answered.

Behind her, down the hall, in the room where the small grey number glowed, her husband turned over in his sleep.

She did not go back to bed for a long time.