No fight preceded it. There was never a breakdown to obsess over. There were more cuts on Val’s legs; there were cuts on Edith’s, too. There were nights one or the other lay awake and watched the darkness fade. There were the boys Edith fucked in Val’s absence; they only confirmed that she would not find comfort elsewhere.

They were sitting by the river, right before the weather cooled. Edith had been complaining about her parents again—the long calls going nowhere, the impossibility of connection—when Val grabbed her hand and said, You know, even if you didn’t want to date, I’d still come stay. I’d still be here with you, as long as you’d have me.

This isn’t dating, what we do.

Val dropped her hand. That’s fair, she said, though it wasn’t.

Edith had no sense of the dailiness of Valerie’s life when she left. The minutiae that filled her day the way medieval astronomers thought ether filled the darkness between stars. When was she bored? When did she sleep badly, or get harassed, or get too drunk and say the wrong thing? They didn’t share a life so much as they sometimes shared space.

They didn’t have sex that night, but lay with their legs threaded together. This easy intimacy might be enough. Edith could spend her life gathering comfort from Val and burning through it when she left. Finding strangers to fuck her and say she had nice legs. There were no bounds on what was possible between them.

Edith understood now that she never knew when Val would leave. Whatever pattern she thought she’d discerned proved false. And so for the next week and a half, she took pleasure in cooking bibimbap and quiches together, watching the sunset in a James Turrell installation, playing laser games with Treats. And when she woke to find that familiar cold, that empty spot on the bed, she did her best not to worry. It was enough that Val was out there. That she’d be back eventually.