Emma stepped into the one clean dress she had left. She put on the filigree earrings she’d picked out online for Miles to buy for her last birthday. She used up her hand cream and trimmed her cuticles, grooming herself like a high school girl because it filled the minutes and she was rather inebriated, but also because she could not decide about Marcus’s things, whether to hide them in the closet.

Until now, she’d been stepping around the red snug-fit boxers Marcus had left on the floor. They were still balled up with one of her sweaty unwashed dresses. She had also yet to touch his backpack, which was still open and leaning against the side of the bed. With each hour he’d been missing, his things and how he’d left them had accrued more meaning. She didn’t know if she could betray their location for Miles’s sake.

In translation, this kind of dilemma was known as domestication. A translator could justify moving around the objects in a sentence if it made it easier for her audience to grasp what was going on. She could even change an object into something more familiar to the reader to avoid baffling him with something he wouldn’t understand. It often occurred with food—with a fruit, for example, that the reader wasn’t likely to recognize and therefore whose sweetness he could not imagine.

The problem with domesticating things this way, however, was the possible misplacement of truth. Emma had made a practice of keeping this dilemma out of mind, of trusting that she was experienced enough now to intuitively know what could be moved and what couldn’t—when the location of an object was, in fact, its meaning.

Which is perhaps why she tripped over the boxers and hit her face on the dresser when Miles knocked on the door.