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Alice knew sports and strength training, which she had done since she was fifteen. But pole vaulting?
    â€œWhy?” she said. She was truly curious.
    He leaned forward across the little café table, his blue eyes on hers. “Because it’s a thinking sport,” he said. “Every time, you have to figure out which pole to use, which height to jump, which strategy to use.” He sat back. “And then you fly.”
    He was all the things Alice had never had before in her life—competent, reliable, trustworthy—and yet he had this one exotic thing about him, this passion for a strange sport that made you feel as if you were flying.
    â€œI’d like to see that sometime,” she had said.
    He had smiled at her. “You will.”
    Later he had told her that he had approached her because she was so pretty but also because she was so careful, picking up each book, studying the cover, reading everything on the back jacket and the inside flaps. “You seemed like a serious person, a thoughtful person,” he said. “But then when we had coffee, you were charming—shy but confident, smart, and you thought pole vaulting was intriguing and not geeky. I was captivated.”
    Captivated. No one in the world—her faraway father, her indifferent mother—had ever found her captivating.
    She looked at him now, inches from her in their too-small bed, his eyes still fixed on a point on the ceiling.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said.
    â€œYou’ve said that.”
    â€œDo you want to talk about it?”
    â€œNo.”
    She didn’t cry. She had never been a crier, and this was beyond that.
    â€œOkay,” she said. “When you want to talk—if you want to talk—I’m here.” She paused. “Always. Forever. ” She waited, held her breath.
    â€œOkay,” he said, and rolled over on his side, his back to her.
    And she had to be satisfied that, for now, that was enough.
    T HE NEXT WEEK was the spring dance team performance at school. The dance team performed—an odd choice, in Alice’s mind—to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” and even though they had edited the sound track and cleaned up the lyrics, Alice was uncomfortable. She worried that Duncan would be shocked that Wren was doing a dance—albeit a passion-filled, very good dance—to a song about a man who hit his wife. She wondered if Duncan was thinking about her and her big lie. Finally, she felt unsettled because she found herself wishing that she and Duncan could express that kind of raw, honest emotion with each other instead of the agonizing politeness that had characterized their marriage for a while, and especially this past month.
    She remembered the first year they were married, when he would come home late at night from work and come upstairs to find her, taking the steps two at a time with those long legs of his, so eager to see her that he couldn’t wait to take off his coat. When had he stopped doing that?
    She had read an article once about a woman who lost her sense of smell. The woman was a hair colorist, and over time the chemicals she worked with had irritated the tiny nerves at the roof of her nose. First, the woman noticed that her son had a different smell when she hugged him; not bad, just different. Then she noticed that her house didn’t smell the same when she made her pungent garlic tomato sauce for the spaghetti. Losing her sense of smell was gradual, the woman said—a missing scent here, a diminished fragrance there—and then it was gone. It took her a while to figure it out.
    And that was exactly what had happened to Alice’s marriage, a dimming, so subtle you didn’t even notice it at first. Duncan had been so busy at work he didn’t have time to respond to her e-mails or texts, not even with a Got it. Thanks. Home at 8:30 . Texts and e-mails were small things, but they were moments of