David Cho

The pendant stops on the third pass.

You feel the room arrive around you in pieces — gray light through a window, the smell of wool and old coffee, a chair that isn't yours holding a body that isn't yours. The therapist's fingers are still raised from the snap. Her eyebrows are already going up, because his — your — eyes have opened wrong. Too fast. Too aware. Not the slow surfacing of a man coming back from twenty minutes of guided breathing, but a man who woke up already looking at her.

"David?" she says. "How are you feeling?"

You know that name. You knew it before this morning, the way you know the parking level he uses and the sandwich he orders on Fridays and the small, precise handwriting he leaves on shared case files. David Cho, second chair on the Ferris litigation, three offices down from yours, the guy who keeps a photo of his wife turned slightly toward his side of the desk so no one else has to look at it.

"Fine," you say, and the voice comes out low, unfamiliar, his. "Good. That was — helpful."

It wasn't supposed to work like this. You know that much, distantly, the way you know things without remembering learning them. This was meant to be smoke, quit smoking, sleep better, whatever brought a thirty-eight-year-old litigator to a rented office with soft chairs and a watch on a chain. Instead you're wearing him like a coat that fits.

The therapist asks if you want water. You say no, thank you, and stand, and your legs — his legs — know exactly how far the door is without you looking.

—

The wedding band catches light on the drive home, David's home, a colonial with brick the color of a scab, part of a street of identical brick houses under the same flat sky you've seen from the courthouse steps in his day-in-the-life photo, the briefcase, the tie. You let yourself in with his key. A woman's voice calls from the kitchen — "How'd it go?" — warm, unguarded, the voice of someone who has said that sentence a hundred times and expects the hundred-and-first answer.

"Fine," you say again. It's becoming your only word.

She's drying a mug when you come in. She looks at you a half-second longer than she needs to — not suspicion, just the small human radar of someone who's shared a bed with a face for years and felt something in the weather of it shift. You smile the way you imagine David smiles, careful, a little tired, a man back from being poked at by a stranger with a watch. It works. Or it works enough. She kisses the corner of your mouth and goes back to the dishes and you stand there amazed at how easy that was, how much of a marriage is just muscle.

—

At the office, on Monday, you sit at his desk and open his email and understand, gradually, that you are not going to be careless with this. Whatever else you are, you did not come here to burn the man's practice down around him. You answer what needs answering. You move the Ferris deposition prep by two days because his handwriting in the margin says *not ready, don't let opposing counsel smell it.* You take his calls in his voice and his coworkers — your coworkers, for this week — don't blink, don't pause, walk past your open door and say *hey, David* the way people say things they've said ten thousand times without looking.

Only once does someone stop. A woman from records, fortyish, kind eyes, leaning in the doorway with a file.

"You seem different today," she says, not unkindly.

"Long week already," you say, and she laughs, and it's true, in its way — it has been a very long week, though it started an hour ago.

—

There is an ex-girlfriend. You don't go looking for her; a text arrives on his phone Wednesday night, an old number saved under a name with no surname, just *Mei*, and the message is nothing — a photo of a restaurant that used to be theirs, now under new ownership, a joke about how it's finally gone downhill. You read it twice. You feel, underneath your own wanting, something that isn't yours: a small ache, old and familiar, worn smooth like a stone in a pocket. You don't answer. It isn't your ache to spend.

His wife asks, at dinner, if everything's okay, because you've gone quiet over the rice, and you say yes, work, and she nods and lets it be work, because work is a door people agree not to open.

—

Thursday you stand in the mirror shaving his jaw and notice, without meaning to, the piercings — two in each ear, small silver hoops, a nose ring you keep touching by accident like a tongue finds a chipped tooth. Someone chose these. Someone stood in a shop once and decided this was who he'd be, underneath the suits and the courthouse steps and the careful margin notes. You didn't choose them. You're only wearing the choice, the way you're wearing all of him, for a little while, on loan.

—

On the seventh day you are back in the soft chair, the pendant swinging though you don't remember asking for it again, David's own request from before you arrived, a follow-up session already on the books. The therapist's voice drops into its old rhythm — *and when I count to three* — and you feel the room start to loosen at the edges, brick houses and gray sky sliding sideways like water off glass.

You think, in the last clear second that's yours: I hope he doesn't remember Mei's text. I hope he never has to.

The pendant stops. A finger snaps.

His eyes open on the therapist, and this time it is only him behind them, blinking, faintly puzzled, the way a man is puzzled by a week he can't quite lay hands on — already reaching, without knowing why, to touch the ring on his own left hand, just to be sure it's still there.