By Melissa Goode

“Come here,” he says.

He sits in the armchair by the empty fireplace. Outside, the magnolia scrapes and rattles against the windowpane, heavy flowers bobbing and heaving. The dawn is windy, as if the world awoke angry. We have not been to sleep.

His flight to Düsseldorf is at 10 AM. I will finish packing his suitcase because he “cannot give a fuck anymore—it is only for work. It is only for two weeks.”

I will drive him to the airport and stay with him until he has to go through security. We will realize that he hasn’t packed x or y or z, or all three. But he has his passport.

“Come here,” he says. I walk over to him and sit in his lap and press my face into the place where his collar meets his neck. The cloth, white, smells of him, his cologne, and I will be able to keep that shirt just as it is because he will have a shower and it will be left forgotten on our bed.

We have nothing but bread, honey, and oranges. We will eat these for breakfast while his cat, Isa, flicks her tail and twines around our legs, her black fur slippery as velvet. I will keep her, too, and she will not be entirely happy about this. She will sometimes leave her bowl of food half-eaten, her milk half-drunk. She will not come when I call her name.

The red roses he bought for me yesterday stand in a vase on the kitchen table, their stems magnified behind the glass, studded with thorns all the way along. I will keep the roses tied together with string, hanging from a hook behind our bedroom door. They will sway and rustle against the door whenever I close it.