She could not hear him sigh, which boded well for him. It was Father’s Day.

The cursor blinked at the end of a partial sentence. He sat for a moment, as if waiting for it to complete his thought.

“Fuck it.” He held his finger on the backspace key until his words were gone.

“Ralph?”

He generally disliked admitting to himself — much less to any other person — that his predominant feeling, with respect to his marriage, was an odd, undifferentiated sort of numbness. Earlier that morning, he had been looking at the photo she had dutifully posted on her WhoAreYou page. It had been a scanned, grainy relic from 2005, taken on this same day, in a much different year. Brandon had been inexpertly cropped from it, the only clue to his presence a disembodied hand on Ralph’s shoulder. Greta’s handiwork — less an attempt to spare Ralph’s deeply buried feelings than one of many expressions of spite.

He forced himself up out of his chair, which creaked in metallic relief. He smelled freshly cooked bacon. He was grateful, at least, for the ritual breakfast that she always cooked on this particular day.