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friendly corner of Astoria like the one I grew up in, where old Greek ladies hung their laundry from their fire escapes and gossiped on their stoops. I’d loved Jonathan’s tiny studio apartment with the perpetually unmade bed shoved into one corner to make room for the dining table. But both of them were ruined for me now. They’d always be the shelter I fled to, clutching the shards of my shattered life, because I hadn’t been about to head back to Adam’s and my little walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. Knowing what must have gone on there, I never wanted to see that place again.
    Even Jonathan was going to be different for me now. He’d been so many things to me: my closest friend, the brother I’d never had. My sounding board, my study partner, the one other person I’d known at college with blue-collar parents and a work-study job. And now he was, forever, the vector that brought Adam and his lover together. The first person I told about the affair, in choking sobs against his chest while Adam paced frantically nearby. The one who took care of me, after.
    In his bathroom, I scrubbed a towel over my face one last time, and faced my reflection in the rust-edged mirror. Whenever I’ve been crying, my hazel eyes always look distinctly green—all that puffy pink skin around them. It’s a physical trait I share with Adam, along with fair skin and opinionated dark blond hair. Before we were married, people used to mistake us for siblings on a regular basis. I used to like it. Now, even my own face was a reminder of his betrayal.
    The takeout Jonathan had ordered while I showered was sitting on the counter when I walked out of the bathroom, but my stomach quivered at the mere suggestion of accepting food.
    “Care, you should try to eat something,” Jonathan said.
    “Not gonna happen.” I slumped onto his couch, picked up the remote, and started absently clicking through the limited offerings of the broadcast channels. Jonathan wouldn’t spring for cable since he basically only came home to sleep.
    “Yes,” he said, dropping the carton of
keftedes
on the coffee table next to me and stabbing his index finger at it. “Eat.”
    I hissed out a sigh, popped the lid off the box, and picked a minuscule bite from one of the meatballs with the flimsy takeout fork.
    “Adam came by while you were in the shower,” said Jonathan. “I told him you didn’t want to see him, and to leave you alone until you were ready to talk. I think he will. But he left a letter for you.”
    Of course he had. I spotted it, then: on the corner of the coffee table, a single sheet of folded, round-edged paper, unmistakably torn from the Moleskine notebook Adam kept with him at all times. Always the same kind, for as long as I’d known him: black cover, eight inches by five inches, ruled. There were three whole shelves of them in Adam’s office at home. Usually the sanctity of the Moleskine was unbreachable; that he had been willing to tear pages from one was an indicator of his distress. An indicator, I should add, that he’d surely known I would recognize.
    “Did you read it?” I said to Jonathan.
    “Of course not.”
    “Good. That makes two of us. It would crush his little soul to know that nobody wants to read his precious fucking words.”
    I said it because I thought it would feel powerful, but even as my mouth made the sounds, a wave of disorientation swamped me. It wasn’t like me to speak about Adam so acidly. It wasn’t what we did, not even in our deepest, darkest fights. But then, he’d never hurt me enough to make me hate him before. Everything about this was uncharted territory…and I was lost in it.
    Jonathan flopped down next to me and stretched his legs out on the table. “If it makes you feel better, I laid a load of truth on him about what a despicable thing this was to do. I lit into him pretty fierce.”
    “Can’t imagine he enjoyed that.” Contrary to the stereotype about redheads having hot tempers, Jonathan