ROSE’S POV
The first cancellation came on a Monday.
A text at six-fifteen. “Something came up. Can’t make it tonight. Tomorrow?”
I read it and I put my phone down and I absorbed it the way I had been absorbing things for the past several weeks, with the specific internal practice of a woman who has decided that patience is the correct position and has been applying that decision in the face of increasing evidence that patience was not producing the outcome it was supposed to produce.
Tomorrow became Wednesday, then Thursday, then: This week has been a lot. Let me call you this weekend.
The weekend call came on Sunday evening, forty minutes late, and lasted twenty-two minutes, and covered his week in the broad strokes of someone performing a status update rather than sharing an exper
