She walks to the stove to turn off the gas. She turns the burner clockwise until it clicks off, the click satisfying, final. She picks up the kettle with a potholder, pours the boiling water into a ceramic mug through a steel screen filled with coarse red tea, puts a small wooden cutting board over the mug, and leaves it to steep.

            She moves into the living room, her slippers shuffling lightly across the floor, and thinks of the word “steep,” saying it softly in her head, twice. The sound of its repetition fills her with a comfort. It reminds her of winter afternoons in her childhood, of her mother and her mother’s hands moving from bowl to counter to sink to oven, deftly, mixing and molding dough and sugar, eyes on her work, a master craftswoman. Jane sees herself watching in awe on the bench in the kitchen nook, hands covered in flour, her face a fleecy blend of the light from the lamp over the table and the fading remnants of dusk crawling in through the window over the sink, half-orange and half-grey.

            She thinks about calling her mother.

            She goes to the windows behind the couch, brushes a curtain aside with her hand and looks out. The street is still—steeped with the cold of late winter—craggy and wan. A man on a bicycle pedals by with a plastic grocery bag swaying off the right handlebar below his hand.

            She sits on the couch and pulls a blanket onto her lap. She picks up a book from the coffee table, an old novel with a coarse blue cover, dust-worn and lovely. She opens the book and reads the inscription: “To Phyllis, With Love, John.” The words are written in fine pre-war penmanship. She wonders how the book got from John to Phyllis’s hands—Christmas? A birthday?—to Phyllis’s bookcase, to a box in Phyllis’s basement, or attic, maybe, to the shelf in the used bookstore where she bought it for two dollars. Maybe it was sold off by Phyllis’s son’s wife who wanted to get the house sold and the whole thing over with.

            She flips the book to the spot where she left off and reads two sentences. She decides she doesn’t want to read right now, doesn’t feel like reading. She puts the book on the table and goes back to the kitchen. She removes the cutting board, inspects the tea and takes out a jar of honey. She sees the inscription in her head again, or just part of it—“With Love, John”—because that was his name, too—is his name—and she still has her own books with inscriptions from him—who throws away books?—and none of them ever said anything as straightforward as “With Love.” That was why she liked them, because they were like a secret code. She needed that, had always needed that. Not only the attention, but the knowing, the specific consideration to and acknowledgement of the things that she felt she was: interesting, thoughtful, and intelligent.  She wanted people to know that she was interesting.

            She was an only child.

            Jane and John. She thinks they sounded like characters in a nursery rhyme.

            She stirs her tea. The honey dissolves in a stringy haze.

            They were in Paris this time last year. They had lunch outside on a mild day. She had her jacket off and wore a scarf. She felt more comfortable wearing a scarf in Europe than in the States. Europe invited scarf-wearing in all seasons. He wore a sweater.

            “This is wonderful,” she said, and looked at him across the table. He gave a half-smile and looked off into the square, at buses and pedestrians and tourists figuring out rotaries and traffic signals.

            The little green man means walk.

            She felt the moment sink in: We’re in Paris, eating at an outdoor café.

            “What are you going to have?” she asked. She looked up and saw that he hadn’t cracked the menu. She smiled and touched his arm, and he looked at her like, “What the hell is it now?” and forced a limp smirk and opened the menu.

            She turns on the TV and flips through the channels. She sips her tea, and it is sweet, perfectly, subtly sweet. The mug is hot in her hands, so she pulls the sleeves of her sweater down over her wrists so they’re potholders. There is a movie on one of the cable stations, one of the stations that shows movies edited down with commercials, that are usually for other movies or shows on the same station. She remembers seeing this movie years ago with him in the theater. He liked it, and she didn’t. Possibly. She can’t remember what he thought of it. She changes the channel.

            The cable was for him. He wanted it for sports. She’s been meaning to get rid of it because she never watches it other than in the way she is now, absently flipping or vegging out to reality crap on channels that used to show music videos. Hours and hours of continuous programming blended together to be like one long episode, called a marathon but more like a quicksand Jacuzzi of brain-coma that you can’t get out of.

            She thinks she would probably be better off without the cable.

            She hasn’t made the call to get it turned off.

            She wanted to see things. She wanted to go to different places in the city to just stand and look—to experience the space. He grew restless during these silences. He needed to check things off a list—we did this, then we did this, then we did this—things to tell people when they got back to the States, specific places they went. From the list. He wanted to baffle people with their obscurity. She took photos concisely and cleverly, already planning how they would look on a wall in a gallery and the order in which she would present them for people to experience. He wanted to cross things off a list.    

            She turns off the TV. She kicks off her slippers and pulls her feet up onto the couch under the blanket. She lets the quiet of the space settle in. The only sound she can hear is the radiator behind the couch. She looks up at the ceiling. She thinks this is how you get older. You sit by the phone on a Sunday and wait for it to get dark outside.

            They went and saw the Eiffel Tower on their last day there, feeling silly and touristy. A group of Japanese schoolchildren swarmed around them. The breeze picked up and blew Jane’s scarf behind her. They took photos of themselves at arms-length, John never looking at the camera, intentionally, Jane noticing and pausing, uneasy—we’re in Paris—shaking her head and laughing out of confusion or futility. Two girls walked by amidst the crowd on the plaza, arm-in-arm, giggly and probably Parisian. She watched them, thin and spry, both of them with bright red lipstick. She expected him to be watching them too, maybe checking them out, but he was looking up at the tower in the midst of a gaze—an ironic tourist caught in genuine awe at the foot of one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

            She figured he’d be looking at the girls when they walked by.

            Her mug is empty. It starts to rain outside, and she wishes it was snow, falling silently and ghostlike, smothering the charcoal and ink of the concrete outside. She stretches out on the couch, all creaky bones and sighs. She thinks she might make some cookies because it will make her feel better. She tries to think of things that she can do that will make her feel better.

            They had dinner that last night at a place on the river. They talked in vague praises—that museum was fun, that garden was pretty—and split a dessert. They walked back to the hotel along the river, the streets empty and lantern-lit. Back in the room they made love with the lights off—we’re in Paris—and fell asleep without brushing their teeth or packing, exhausted by the city and the walking and each other.

            He came to get his things when she was at work. Their belongings had intermingled and accumulated through four years, and he was in and out in less than nine hours. When she got home his stuff was gone. She figured she would find something of his in amongst her things, a random sock in her drawer or CD under the seat in her car. She searched her bookshelves for a mistake. Anything. One of her art books missing. Enough for an email or a phone call or a spartan voicemail. “You have my book. Please return it to me.” But there was nothing. He was methodical and thorough. He’d probably brought a list. His key sat alone on the kitchen table. When she saw it she almost gasped, as if she had opened a cupboard and seen a dead mouse.

            She goes back into the kitchen and looks through the cabinets for cookie ingredients. She opens up tins and looks inside them. The one marked “flour” is empty apart from a slight dusting at the bottom. She can’t remember the last time she made cookies.