But why? Phoebe couldn’t bring herself to ask her husband this. Because she knew why. She looked at Mia in her big wooden earrings and her cropped black jeans and an oversize pink blazer that somehow made her seem skinnier. It made Phoebe feel foolish to think that her husband would be wooed back by a simple A-line black dress. Was this why it was so hard to be mad at Mia? Because Phoebe knew on some level that Mia was just better? Always standing there in her big earrings, making Phoebe wonder why Phoebe always had to be herself.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said.

Mia got down on her knees. In Phoebe’s fantasies, this was how Mia always apologized to her: literally groveled at her feet. Phoebe couldn’t believe it was actually happening and felt herself get excited.

But then Mia added, “I’m sorry, this will only take a minute,” and it made Phoebe so angry. Because a paper jam always took longer than a minute. Phoebe knew this. Mia knew this. Mia started opening up all the drawers the machine told her to open, but even then, Mia couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know where drawer five was, and this is when Phoebe normally would have helped her look for drawer five, but she refused.

“This is what you’re sorry about?” Phoebe asked.

Mia’s eyes flickered over to the admin’s desk, as if to suggest Phoebe not do this here, so close to Jane’s pound cake, and Phoebe could suddenly understand why affairs ended with someone dead. Her rage felt ruinous, too big for the hum of this small, quiet office.

“You slept with my husband,” Phoebe said, not so loud to be yelling but loud enough for Jane to hear.

“Look, I’m sorry I hurt you,” Mia whispered. “I’m sorry it happened the way it did. But I’m not sorry it happened. I can’t be. I love him.”

“No, I love him,” Phoebe said. “He’s my husband.”

It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document. This was not how it was supposed to go. In her fantasy, Phoebe doesn’t ever mention her husband. Instead, Phoebe delivers an impassioned and loud monologue about what an awful woman Mia is, the biggest traitor of all the traitors, an embarrassment to women, and then Phoebe walks out of the office, out of the building, feeling victorious, never to return again.

“He’s not your husband,” Mia said. “Not anymore.”

Phoebe felt crazy. She felt like she was a kid, crying over a bath her father wouldn’t let her take because he had to go to work. “Fine, Phoebe, have a tantrum, see what good that will do,” her father had said. And that’s when she learned it did nothing except make her father leave a room.

“I thought you were my friend,” Phoebe said calmly. She was trying to compose herself. She couldn’t bear it if Mia walked out, if she left her alone with this horrible feeling.

“I was your friend,” Mia said. “And I will always regret damaging our friendship.”

“Damaging? You ruined it. You ruined everything. My life. My job. My marriage.”

“I really do like you, Phoebe. And I hope we can somehow be friends at the end of this. But I did not ruin your marriage. That is not on me. The only reason Matt fell in love with me was because your marriage was already over.”

As if to conclude her argument, Mia pulled out the piece of paper. Mia solved the jam, but it was too late. Class had started five minutes ago. Phoebe was already divorced. Phoebe had signed the final papers. There was nothing her anger could do here.

The door opened. Stan, the Americanist, took one look at her black dress and said, “Wowwee, Phoebe, nice dress!”

She didn’t know what else to do but say, “Thanks.”

Then Mia snuck out of the office with her papers, and Phoebe stood there for a moment, feeling utterly bereft and flattened, like land right after a bomb hits. She walked to class empty-handed, said hello to her students, and yes, she understood why they never said hello back—a lesson Phoebe learned in yoga class last month when the instructor said hello, and everyone waited for someone else to do it. Everyone always hoped it was someone else who would be bold. They were like Phoebe.

But Phoebe was sick of them. Sick of herself. Sick of everything.

She walked out of the class without a word, got in her car, and drove home. By the time she walked into her kitchen, her hands were shaking. Something was wrong. She called her therapist, thinking he might help, but he sounded wrong, too.

“Listen, before we have another session, there’s something you need to know,” he said, and why did he sound just like her husband before he left?

“I have thought long and hard about this, Phoebe, but unfortunately, I am going to have to drop your new health insurer,” her therapist said. “They’re just too unethical to do business with, and I refuse to work that way.”

Then he reminded her that what he was doing was setting a boundary, like this might be a learning moment for her.

“You’ll have to pay out of pocket for this session, and all future sessions, if you want to go forward,” he added.

She hung up on him. She couldn’t afford to go forward. She got small alimony payments from Matt, but they were only enough to cover the new insurance payments she made ever since losing coverage after the divorce. A thousand dollars a month, just for catastrophic. Trying to stay alive was starting to bankrupt her, and even though Phoebe had been as good a saver as she was a researcher, the children’s savings fund was starting to run out. She was going to have to apply to teaching jobs all over again, which she already knew was hopeless, because she had tried it last August.

So she was going to have to sell the house. It was the only solution. But she couldn’t bear to sell the house. The house was the only thing she had left. And Harry.

“Assuming you take United,” she joked, and at least she could still joke. At least she still had Harry. Where was Harry anyway? She rattled his bottle of painkillers, which always made Harry come running because the pills were flavored like tuna. But Harry didn’t come running, and she knew. Before she found him in the basement, curled up into himself, she knew.

She was too distraught to bury him. Instead, she just left Harry there, drove to Joe’s, got mind-blisteringly drunk, and woke up the next morning with such a headache, such a weight on her chest, she knew her life was over.

But still, it was Tuesday. The second day of the semester. She had another Intro to Lit at ten-thirty. She made toast. She looked over her old lecture notes on Leaves of Grass. She saw the scribbles of her past self in the margins next to the lines, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death … Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” She had always secretly thought those lines were bullshit until that morning when she held up the gray blouse in front of the mirror. No, she wouldn’t put on that blouse. She wouldn’t go to work. Why bother? She could already see the whole day—the whole long and lonely life—before it happened.

Whitman was right. How lucky it would be to die, she thought—to just be the dirt. To just be a plant. To be made beautiful again by becoming part of the earth.

It is a lovely way to think about death. It’s circular. And she always loved circular endings in literature, even if they were completely unrealistic. Probably why she was the only one in her Victorian literature class who actually liked the ending of Jane Eyre. She liked the endings of all marriage plots. The books were orderly and deliberate. They succeeded on their own terms. The endings always reflected the beginnings. The authors had powerful control of the narratives. The deaths were put into a kind of cosmic order that made everybody feel better about being alive, because they happened offstage, in the South of Italy or at the seaside, where characters were given the grace and dignity to die on beds more beautiful than their own.

She put down the blouse. She looked at Harry’s painkillers, and she booked a room at the Cornwall.

She sits on the canopy bed and tries to relax, but being relaxed about her death is proving to be difficult, even on this king-sized pillow-top. She still feels like she should be doing something significant. She still feels too much like herself in her head, worrying about all the small things that are already ruining her beautiful ending, like the blood on the bride’s dress. The sound of the toilet flushing next door. The smell of the air conditioner, not to mention the wedding people gathering on the patio below.

The bride’s opening reception has begun.

She puts on the headphones of her old Discman to drown out the people talking below. But the CD is so scratched, the music skips. Instead of making her feel calm, it makes her anxious. So she takes them off, goes out to the balcony, and lights a cigarette.

This time, she actually smokes it. She hopes that it will make sitting on a chair seem more elevated than just sitting on a chair. Takes one puff like she’s posing for a painting. Woman Smoking and Drinking While Having Some Thoughts, she’d call it.

But when she blows the smoke out into the salty air, she starts coughing so hard, it burns her lungs.

“Shit,” she says. Not a good feeling. “Ugh. This is truly awful.”

Yet she takes another puff, because when she imagined her death, she imagined herself smoking. She imagined it would work like a metronome keeping the time. Keeping her steady. Because she has nothing to keep her steady. No dinner to eat, no music to enjoy, no luggage to unpack, no husband to call, no book to finish, no counters to clean, no hormone shots to inject, no vacations to research, no future life to organize into spreadsheets. There is no more time left and so there is weirdly no urgency for anything.

She smokes the rest of the cigarette slowly. She does not want to feel rushed. She does not want to go out frantic and through a window like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, a scene that upset her so much, it became the only book in graduate school that she never finished reading.

Her stomach growls. She hopes she doesn’t get too hungry to kill herself. She takes another sip of the chocolate wine. At least the wine is partly chocolate, she thinks. At least I have this balcony. She watches the waves in the distance start to gather, but they never get large enough to break. Sort of like the jazz from the reception below—the notes rising and falling and rising and falling but never coming to an end.

She leans over the edge to get a better look at the reception. She’s curious, she admits. She’s always loved a wedding, will watch any TV show or read any book to the end if it promises a wedding. That’s how she got through those long novels in graduate school, reading hundreds of pages just to watch people get married.

She scans for the bride but sees only High Bun and Neck Pillow, picking up long-stemmed drinks from a tray. The Jims standing under some fairy lights, arguing with faces of men who want to kill each other, and it surprises her when they break into laughter.

At least I’m on the top floor, she thinks—up on the balcony from where she can stare and pass judgment without being noticed, like the seagulls that circle high above. From here, she can see it all, even what it will be like to be dead, because that is one of the few gifts that depression gives her: aerial vision. She already knows what the world will look like without her, because last August, she sat at home while everyone returned to their offices, their routines, their roles—and she knows the bride will be able to do this, too. The bride may gasp at the news of Phoebe’s suicide, but then she’ll take a walk down the beach to calm herself. She will feel the breeze blow her hair back. She will be grateful for the sun. For her champagne. She will laugh and lean on her groom’s shoulder, beautiful hair falling into her face, and Phoebe will be forgotten by sunset.

“Just get on with it,” Phoebe tells herself.

But then there is a knock on the door, as if someone heard her. She puts the cigarette out quickly, closes the balcony door, and the feeling of hiding her cigarette is strangely familiar. It makes her hope that her husband is at the door, though of course he’s not. He doesn’t even know where she is.

“Are you seriously smoking?” the bride asks.

The bride walks into the room as if it is her own. The bride’s dress is bloodless now—another white one, but gauzier and with dramatic fluttery sleeves.