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neurotic and have limited interpersonal skills,” she’d explain. “You know that. Next time, don’t take me so seriously.”
    Then again, sleeping alone for the first time since they’d moved in together, she’d noticed a change. The bed was deliciously spacious, and the walls stayed where they belonged. Without Saraub, she could breathe.
    So she moved to the Golden Nugget and told him it was temporary, when in fact, she was pretty sure it was permanent. She stopped wearing the ring on her finger, and now carried it in her pocket wherever she went, because she didn’t trust the hotel staff not to break in and steal it. Probably, she should give it back to him. But she wasn’t ready to, just yet.
    And here she stood with a packed bag, checking out of a fleabag flophouse. Not so different from the Midwest no-tell motels her mother had dragged her through like a rag doll when she was a kid. Maybe this was how Betty had started her descent, too. A relationship that got too close. A move too many. And then the inevitable red ants of madness that had followed them from town to town, like they’d developed a taste for her scent.
    Audrey took one last look at the room. She’d straightened, of course: folded white sheets, a Bible, and a sparkling ashtray. The blinking red message light on the phone and the letter “S” traced into the glass-topped nightstand with her finger were the only evidence that she’d lived here at all.
    She imagined going back in time. Picking up her suitcase, and walking rearward out the door. Reversing the order of this thing she’d done, so that she’d never signed the lease for The Breviary, never done anything that couldn’t be undone. She’d return home to Saraub and fall asleep alone in their futon, and when she woke, she’d be on a date at a fancy French restaurant, only this time, she’d take it all back. He’d talk about moving to Yonkers, and she’d tell him, “I hope we have enough kids for a football team!”
    Yes, she decided. She would go back to him. It wasn’t too late. If she stayed on this desolate road she was carving for herself, she knew what would happen. Her life would become an empty thing. Erased daily because she had no one to share it with. She’d become a phantom again, and this time her mother wasn’t around to blame.
    She picked up her bag.
    Saraub, or The Breviary?
    Saraub.
    The idea of him caught in her chest and pressed out her breath like a weight. She imagined getting fat with a kid in her belly. She’d try to sit at her desk, and she wouldn’t fit. They’d fire her, and she’d get stuck cleaning the Victorian and playing host to the bitch quartet while with every year, Saraub’s center of gravity got lower, and his smile more fake, and the smudges on the walls became holes. Her breath got slow, and then was gone altogether. Before she found him, when the space in her stomach had been an empty thing called longing, she’d known the truth. Squandering love is the ugliest of sins. She wished she was a stronger person. Shewished she could reach inside herself and fix this thing that was broken. But she couldn’t.
    In her mind, the asphalt outside opened again into a hungry black hole. It widened like a wave and crashed against all the families walking home from church. It crashed through the hotel window, too. The current pulled her back out and into its depths as it receded. It carried her to a small, dark place deep underground, where she became still as a shadow and she didn’t need to breathe.
    The Breviary, indeed.

3
All the Pretty Young Things in the Dark
    I live here now. I’m moving in today,” Audrey told the doorman at The Breviary. He was a skinny Haitian man wearing a faded gray uniform with silver buttons. It reminded her of a bellhop costume from the 1950s. She bit her lip and gave him a pleading look: she’d forgotten to call ahead and reserve the freight elevator, and it had only occurred to her now, looking at the sign that