The Green Tape

Orson made two cups of tea on Monday morning and stood looking at the second one. Anouk had said she would call after work. She had not said she would appear for breakfast. He tipped the extra tea into a flask and took it with him rather than giving the mistake a tragic importance it hadn’t earned.

At the studio he taught a class, cleaned the table and spent his lunch break sitting outside with the flask between his knees. He had asked for less absence because that was what he wanted. There was no shame in it. There was also no guarantee that the life he wanted most existed intact inside the woman he loved.

He had been treating the imagined version as a measure of whether the real one was enough.

It was a difficult thing to admit. Easier to say he had learned from his marriage, as…