She said she'd come about the dryer.
"It's making that noise again," she said. "The one from March."
He didn't look up from the tablet. "We fixed that."
"You fixed something. It's making a noise."
He scrolled. She sat on the arm of the couch, which she only did when she was waiting for him to notice something, and he knew that — knew the semiotics of where she sat — and didn't look up.
"Did you talk to Rana?"
"About the dryer?"
"About the dryer."
She pulled at a thread on the cushion seam. "Rana's in Portland."
"She's back."
The thread came loose. She wound it around her finger. "You talked to her?"
"She called me, Jules."
The room was doing that thing rooms do when the floor plan changes and the furniture hasn't been moved yet — the same objects in the same positions, suddenly in the wrong places.
"She told me what you told her," he said. "About the appointment."
"I didn't tell her anything about an appointment."
"You told her you were scared."
Jules stood up. Went to the kitchen. Opened a cabinet she didn't need anything from and closed it. Opened the one next to it. Took down a glass she wasn't going to use.
"I was talking about the dryer," she said.
"Stop trying to change the topic. You clearly knew something you didn't want to admit."
She set the glass on the counter, carefully, the way you set something down when your hands are deciding whether to shake. "I knew a lot of things I didn't want to admit. You're going to have to be more specific."
"The scan."
"The scan was fine."
"Rana said—"
"Rana said what I said to Rana at eleven o'clock at night after two glasses of wine, which is not the same thing as a medical report, Martin."
He put the tablet down. She noted the precise way he aligned it with the edge of the table — the same alignment he used for serious conversations, for contracts, for the papers he'd brought home the spring they almost separated.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.
She picked up the glass. Put it back in the cabinet. Wrong shelf. Moved it to the right shelf. Noticed a water stain on the one beside it and thought about how water stains only become visible when you're looking at something else.
"Because you'd do this," she said. "This exact thing. You'd put the tablet down like that. You'd ask in that voice. And then we'd be in the conversation, and once we were in the conversation it would be real, and I wasn't ready for it to be real yet."
"It's real whether we talk about it or not."
"No," she said. "It isn't. That's what nobody understands. It isn't real until someone says it out loud in a room with furniture in it. Before that, it's just mine."