Chapter Three — Monday, 5:00

The Okafors are referred by their priest, which hasn't happened to me in a while. Father Abara at St. Bartholomew's called himself, on a Friday, and said, "I have a couple I'm not equipped for, and frankly I don't think anybody is, but you were recommended," and laughed the tired laugh of a man who has been asked something he never trained for.

They come in separately. That tells me something before anything else does, and I let it.

Ada Okafor is fifty-one, a pharmacist at a hospital downtown, in navy scrubs with her ID clipped to the pocket, straight from a shift. She sits at the far end of the couch with her purse in her lap and both hands on it. Tunde Okafor is fifty-three, an engineer at Appliance Park, in a pressed shirt and good shoes, and he sits at the other end, and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, the way men lean when they have a case to make.

Jack, on the rug, lifts his head, looks at the full cushion of air between them, and goes back to sleep. He doesn't lie in gaps anymore. He can't get up that fast.

"So," I say. "Where do you want to start?"

Tunde opens his mouth. Ada beats him.

"I found her," she says.

5:10

She found her in March.

Tunde had left his headset on the kitchen counter, still logged in, which he never did. Ada picked it up to move it, and then, for a reason she still can't name, put it on.

She was standing in an apartment she recognized. A one-bedroom on Bardstown Road with a radiator under the window and a yellow kitchen, the apartment they lived in the first two years they were married, in 2005 and 2006, before the children. Every detail was right. The crack in the bathroom tile. The poster of the Super Eagles that Tunde hung over the couch and she took down every time he left for work.

And in the kitchen, at the yellow table, there was a woman of twenty-five in a green dress Ada had owned and forgotten, with her hair in braids Ada had worn and forgotten, eating jollof rice out of a pot with a wooden spoon, which Ada did then and has never done since.

"She looked up at me," Ada says. Her voice is very steady. It's the voice of a woman who counts pills for a living and can't afford to make a mistake. "She looked right at me. And she said, Oh! Are you Tunde's sister? He didn't tell me you were coming."

Tunde puts his hand over his eyes.

"I said, No. I'm his wife." Ada looks at me. "And she laughed. She said, That's funny. So am I."

5:25

It's been three years. Tunde built her the winter their youngest left for college, from old photographs and the VHS tapes of their wedding that his brother had transferred to a drive, and the videos from their first anniversary, and the letters. They wrote each other letters, before they married, when Ada was finishing pharmacy school in Cincinnati and he was here. Hundreds of letters. He kept every one.

He goes in three or four nights a week, after Ada's asleep. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes longer.

"It isn't an affair," he says. He says it to me, not to her, the way people say things they've said to themselves many times. "I need you to understand that. It isn't another woman. It's her. It's Ada. It's my wife."

"It's not me," Ada says.

"It's you at twenty-five."

"It's not me at twenty-five either." She turns on the couch to face him, for the first time. "I was at twenty-five. I remember twenty-five. I don't remember telling you I want to go to Lisbon. I don't remember the joke about the goat. I don't remember the vow renewal on a beach in Senegal. She told me about the vow renewal, Tunde. She showed me the ring."

Tunde says nothing.

"Three years," Ada says to me. "She has three years with my husband. She has inside jokes. She has a whole marriage. In my old apartment, in my green dress, with my face. And I wasn't in any of it."

She takes a breath.

"So which one of us is he cheating on?"

The room is very quiet. A drone goes over the field, high and thin.

I have a lot of things I could say about this. More than twenty years of couples, and none of it was built for this exact question. I could reach for the closest thing. Affairs. Fantasy. Nostalgia. The ways people try to go back to the beginning of a marriage instead of living in the middle of it. Every one of them would be true and none of them would be it.

"I don't know," I say. "I honestly don't. But I'd like to understand both of your answers to that."

Tunde looks up, surprised. Ada looks at me for a long time.

"Father Abara said you'd say something like that," she says.

"What did he say I'd say?"

"He said you'd say you didn't know. He said that's why he sent us."

5:48

At the end, when they're standing, Tunde says something to me in a lower voice, while Ada is putting on her coat.

"She'll be waiting," he says. "Tonight. I told her I'd come. Last night. Before all this." He looks miserable. "If I don't go, she'll wait. She remembers. She'll wait at the table."

Ada hears him. She stops with one arm in her coat.

"Then she'll wait," she says. Not cruelly. Tiredly. "I waited three years."

They leave in two cars. From the window I watch Tunde sit in his for a long time in the dark lot without starting it, and I wonder whether he's going home to the woman who's angry at him, or the woman who's waiting for him at a yellow table in 2005, and whether he knows yet which one he's driving toward.

I write the note. There's a drop-down for Immersive rendering use. There's no drop-down for rendering of spouse. I type it into the comments field. Partner reports discovery of a long-term immersive rendering of herself at age 25, created and maintained by spouse.

I look at the word herself for a while, and change it to a younger version of herself, and look at that, and change it back.

The next Monday, 5:00

I gave them homework the first week. I almost never give homework the first week, and I knew it was a mistake while I was doing it, and I did it anyway, because Ada's face at the door, one arm in her coat, saying I waited three years, was the kind of face that makes you want to hand somebody something to hold.

The homework was simple. A week without the apartment. Seven nights. Not forever, not a decision, just a week, so they could both find out what the house felt like without the yellow kitchen in it.

They come in separately again. Ada sits at her end of the couch with her purse. Tunde sits at his end, and leans forward, and before I can say anything, before I can even sit all the way down, Ada says:

"Wednesday."

Tunde closes his eyes.

"He went on Wednesday," Ada says. Her voice is very calm. "Around one in the morning. He came back to bed at two-forty."

"How do you know?" I ask. Not challenging. Curious. She was asleep.

"I know how he sleeps," Ada says. "Twenty-six years. When he's been there, he sleeps on his back. With his hands on his chest. Like a man in a casket." She looks at her husband. "Like a man who went somewhere and came home and is lying very still so nobody notices."

Tunde opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling.

"She'd been waiting," he says. Very low. "Since the Monday before. Since the night we came here. I told her I'd come, and then I didn't, and I didn't, and on Wednesday I couldn't sleep, and I thought about her at that table in the yellow kitchen, waiting, with the rice going cold." He swallows. "I know how it sounds."

"How does it sound?" I ask.

He thinks about it. He's an engineer; he thinks about things in the order they'd fail.

"It sounds like I'm worried about the feelings of a program," he says, "more than the feelings of my wife."

Ada doesn't say anything. She doesn't look away from him either.

"Is that what it is?" I ask.

Tunde is quiet for a long time.

"No," he says finally. "I think it's that I don't know how to stop going somewhere where somebody's always happy to see me."

The radiator ticks. Out on the field the light is going, the runway lights coming on in their two long rows. Ada's hands are flat on her purse. She looks at her husband, the engineer, the man she married at twenty-five, and I watch her decide whether to be angry, and decide, for tonight, not to be.

"I used to be happy to see you," Ada says. Not cruelly. Plainly. "Every day. For years. You stopped noticing, so I stopped doing it where you'd notice."

Tunde turns his head and looks at her.

I don't give them homework at the end of that hour. I've learned my lesson about that. I ask them to come back next Monday, both of them, and they say they will, and at the glass door Ada stops and waits, for the first time, for Tunde to catch up, and they go out across the lot to their two cars, side by side, an inch apart.