Wanda found the remote on the end table where Jim had set it, and she picked it up, and she pressed play.

The screen woke. Lily came back mid-sentence — something about breathing into the back ribs — her voice pouring out of the 80-inch speakers warm and unhurried, like she'd been waiting all this time for them to come back to her. She was folded into a seated twist now, one hand braced behind her on the mat, her spine a long slow curve under the studio lights. The thin gray top had ridden up at the waist. A sliver of brown belly, the faint crease of a navel, gone again when she moved.

Wanda settled back into the sofa cushions and tucked her feet up under her, yoga pants stretched tight over her knees. The lamp beside her threw a long yellow shape across the carpet and up the far wall, and somewhere in the kitchen the refrigerator hummed its one note. Jim's weight left the cushion beside her. She heard him in the kitchen — the tap, a glass, the tap again.

"You want water?" he called.

"I've got wine."

"It's gone."

"Then yes."

On screen Lily unfolded herself, came up onto her knees, and reached for something off-camera. The camera followed her hand, which meant for three full seconds the frame was nothing but the curve of her from hip to shoulder, the top pulling taut across her back, the seam of her leggings riding up between her cheeks. Wanda watched it the way she'd been watching it for a month now — with the part of her brain that had spent thirty years in emergency rooms cataloguing bodies and had never once been able to stop.

Jim came back with two glasses and handed her one and sat down, close, his thigh against hers, the whole length of him warm through the thin cotton of his boxers. He hadn't put anything else on. She liked that. She liked that he'd stopped asking whether he should.

"You're watching her ass," she said.

"I'm watching the video."

"Her ass is in the video."

"Then I'm watching the video." He drank. The glass made a small click against his teeth. "You told me to."

"I told you to say it out loud during happy baby. I didn't tell you to stare at her ass during the twist."

"You paused it on her crotch for a full minute."

"That was research."

"Research."

"I'm a nurse. I research." Wanda drank her wine and let the glass rest against her sternum. On screen, Lily had come into a low lunge, front knee bent, back leg long, and she was saying something about opening the hip flexors, her voice dropping into that soft register she used for the hard parts. "She's good, though. You have to admit she's good. I did her whole spine sequence last Tuesday and I could turn my head all the way left for the first time since the Carter administration."

"You couldn't turn your head left?"

"I could turn it. I just didn't want to."

Jim laughed — that low, easy laugh that still did something to the back of her neck after all these years — and put his arm along the top of the sofa behind her, and his fingers found the loose tail of her ponytail and tugged it, once, gently, the way he had since they were twenty-three and he didn't know yet that he was going to marry her.

The video ran on. Lily moved through a series of slow seated folds, each one narrated in that same unhurried voice, and Wanda found her attention splitting — half on the screen, half on the heat still sitting low in her belly from an hour ago, the memory of her own finger inside her husband, the way he'd clenched, the way he'd made a sound she'd never heard him make in thirty years. She'd been thinking about it since. She'd been thinking about it while she rinsed the glasses and while she locked the front door and while she stood in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror with her hair coming loose from the ponytail, fifty years old, silver at the temples, and a little bit thrilled.

The video began to wind down. Lily came to a cross-legged seat at the front of her mat, hands on her knees, and the camera pushed in a little, and she smiled that slow, open smile at the lens.

"Okay, friends," she said. "That's our practice for tonight. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed it, hit the like — it really does help the channel — and leave me a comment. Tell me how your body feels. Tell me what you want to work on next. I read all of them. I promise."

She held the smile a beat longer, then reached forward and the screen cut to black, and the little end-card came up with her channel name and two suggested videos and a subscribe button pulsing in the corner.

Wanda set her wine on the end table and picked up her phone.

"What are you doing," Jim said.

"Commenting."

"On what."

"On the video." She thumbed the screen awake and opened the app. The live stream had already converted to a replay, the chat frozen and scrolling nowhere, the comment box sitting there under the video with its pale gray placeholder — Add a comment... — and she touched it with her thumb and the keyboard came up and the cursor blinked.

Jim leaned over to look. She angled the phone away from him.

"Wanda."

"It's a comment."

"What kind of comment."

"A supportive one. She asked us to tell her how our body feels." Wanda's thumbs moved. "My body feels great, actually. My body feels better than it has in about a decade. I'm going to tell her so."

"Wanda—"

"She said she reads all of them."

She typed. She typed faster than she'd typed anything in years, her thumbs working the small keyboard, and she was grinning while she did it, the grin she got when she was doing something she knew she shouldn't and had already decided to do anyway. Lily, my husband and I do your videos every night on our big TV. Tonight we did them naked. During downward dog his back went out and when I helped him up my finger slipped inside his ass and he clenched so hard I couldn't get it out. I spit on it and kept going and he came harder than he has in years. Then you went into happy baby and we both just stared at your camel toe. You are the best thing that has happened to our marriage in a long time. Thank you.

She read it back once. She laughed — a short, bright, disbelieving laugh, the sound of a woman watching herself from the ceiling.

"Okay," she said. "That's the one."

"Let me see it."

"No."

"Wanda—"

"It's a surprise."

She meant to hit the little arrow that opened the DM drawer. That had been the plan — a private message, just to Lily, the way you'd slip a note under a door. But her thumb came down a half-inch left of where she'd aimed, and the screen did that small, instant, irreversible thing that screens do, the little gray toast sliding up from the bottom — Comment posted — and the comment box emptied itself and her words reappeared in the list below the video, in public, in black text on white, at the top of the thread, under her own name and her own little round profile picture, the one from her cousin's wedding six years ago where she'd had her hair up.

Wanda stared at it.

"Wanda."

"Hm."

"What did you do."

"Nothing." She turned the phone face-down on her thigh. "Nothing. It's fine."

"You just made a face."

"I made a face?"

"You made the face you make when you've dropped something."

"I haven't dropped anything." She picked the phone back up. The comment was still there. It was, in fact, very much still there, and underneath it, already, a small gray counter had appeared: 1 reply. She watched the counter. The counter did not go away. She pressed the three little dots beside her comment and a menu came up — Edit. Delete. Report. — and her thumb hovered over Delete, and then over Edit, and then over Delete again, and then she set the phone down on the end table and picked up her wine and took a long drink of it.

"Okay," she said. "So."

"So?"

"So I may have posted it to the comments instead of the messages."

Jim was quiet for a second. Then he started to laugh — that low, rolling laugh, the one that came up out of his chest and shook the sofa — and he put his glass down on the floor because he was laughing too hard to hold it, and he leaned his head back against the sofa and laughed at the ceiling.

"It's not funny," Wanda said.

"It's a little funny."

"It's on the internet, Jim."

"It was always going to be on the internet. You were going to send it to her."

"Privately!"

"You were going to send a stranger a paragraph about my ass and your finger and you're worried about the venue?"

Wanda opened her mouth. Closed it. Drank her wine.

"Okay," she said. "Fair."

She picked the phone up again. The counter under her comment had changed. 3 replies. And then, while she watched it, 4. She scrolled down and there they were, stacking up under her words like cars piling into a wreck — a username she didn't recognize, then a string of emojis, then a woman named Deb who ran the book club and had known Wanda since the girls were in elementary school:

WANDA HOLLOWAY. 😂😂😂

And under that, from a woman whose profile picture was a golden retriever:

Okay so I just read this out loud to my husband and he choked on a chip. Wanda, you absolute legend.

Wanda read it twice. Then she read it a third time and something in her chest went loose and warm, because it wasn't disgust, it wasn't are you okay, it was legend, and she had not been called a legend by anyone since a drunk intern in the ER called her that in 2009 for pulling a chicken bone out of a man's throat with a pair of forceps.

"What," Jim said. He'd stopped laughing. He was watching her face the way he watched the truck when it made a new noise.

"Nothing."

"That's the other face."

"I have two faces?"

"You have about nine."

She turned the phone toward him. He took it — careful, the way he took anything with a screen — and held it out at arm's length and read. His mouth moved a little when he read. It always had. She'd noticed it on their second date and never told him, because it was the kind of thing you kept.

"Deb Miller," he said.

"Deb Miller."

"Deb Miller knows about my ass."

"Deb Miller has known about your ass since the block party in '04. She just didn't have the vocabulary before."

He handed the phone back. There was a flush coming up his neck, the one that started under the collar and climbed, and it wasn't embarrassment exactly — she'd known his embarrassment for thirty years and this was a different animal. This was the thing that had been in the room an hour ago. This was the sound he'd made.

"There's more," she said.

"How much more."

"Let me look."

She scrolled. The thread had grown a spine while they'd been talking — fifteen replies, then twenty, the little gray counter climbing in the corner of the screen like a heart monitor. A woman named Priya from the Tuesday class. A man with a beard and a kayak in his profile picture who wrote this is the content I subscribe for and then, a second later, genuinely though, congrats on the marriage. Someone had replied to Wanda's comment with a single word — goals — and eleven people had liked the word goals. Wanda sat with that one a while.

And then the phone buzzed in her hand, a real buzz, the long double-pulse of a text, and the little banner dropped down from the top of the screen and she read it before she could stop herself, the way you read anything that falls into your lap.

Marcia: Wanda. We need drinks. Now.

Wanda looked at it. She looked at Jim.

"What," he said again.

"Marcia."

"Marcia who."

"Marcia who does your scheduling, Jim. Marcia who's been your secretary for eleven years. Marcia who I have drinks with every third Thursday." She held the phone up so he could see the banner before it slid away. "That Marcia."

Jim went very still. The flush on his neck finished its climb and reached his ears.

"She saw it," he said.

"She saw it."

"How did she see it."

"Because," Wanda said, and she was already scrolling back up to the top of her own comment, already seeing it, the thing she should have seen an hour ago and hadn't because she'd been too busy being clever — "because my YouTube is linked to my Facebook, Jim. It cross-posts. It's been cross-posting since 2016. Every comment I've ever left on anything has gone straight to my wall." She found it. There it was, at the top of her feed, her own face from her cousin's wedding, and under it, in the same black text on white, the whole paragraph — my finger slipped inside his ass and he clenched so hard I couldn't get it out — sitting there between a photo of Deb's grandson's graduation and a video of a raccoon eating a slice of pizza off a porch.

"Oh," Wanda said.

"Oh?"

"Oh, it's on Facebook."

Jim took the phone out of her hand. She let him. He scrolled down through it, slowly, his thumb moving the way it moved over a parts diagram, and she watched his face do the thing it did when he was taking in a whole engine at once — the flat calm of a man counting.

"Forty-one reactions," he said.

"That's not bad."

"Forty-one reactions and nineteen comments."

"That's — Jim, that's actually not bad for a Tuesday."

"One of them's from my mother's cousin."

"Cousin Ruth is ninety-four, she won't know what it means."

"Cousin Ruth commented amen."

Wanda laughed. She couldn't help it, it came up out of her the way Jim's had come up out of him, and she put her hand over her mouth and laughed into it and Jim looked at her with the flat calm cracking at the edges, and then he was laughing too, both of them, the sofa shaking, the wine sloshing in her glass, and somewhere on the screen the end-card was still pulsing its little subscribe button at an empty room.

"I'm going to have to see Marcia on Monday," Jim said, when he could talk.

"You see Marcia every day."

"I see Marcia every day and now Marcia knows what my face looks like when—" He stopped. He didn't finish it. He drank his water instead, all of it, in one go, and set the glass down on the floor next to the wine.

Wanda watched him not finish it and felt the thing in her chest turn over.

"She has a crush on you," she said.

Jim's head came around. "What?"

"Marcia. She has a crush on you. Has for years."

"Wanda, that's—"

"It's cute," Wanda said. "I think it's cute. She gets this little thing she does with her hair when your name comes up at drinks. She's never said a word about it. She's a professional." She picked up her wine and finished it, and set the glass down beside his, both of them on the floor now, side by side. "She's going to text me a hundred times before Monday. She's going to want the whole thing. And I'm going to give it to her, because that's what she's asking for, and because I've been holding this in for a month and it's nice to finally have somewhere to put it."

Jim was quiet. On the screen, the end-card had cycled to a suggested video and started playing it on its own, some other instructor, some other studio, a woman in a maroon top doing something with a resistance band, and neither of them looked at it.

"A month," he said.

"A month."

"You said that before. About Lily."

"I've been watching Lily for a month. I've been thinking about this for a month." Wanda pulled her feet out from under her and set them on the floor and sat forward, elbows on her knees, and looked at her husband in the yellow lamplight with his salt-and-pepper hair sticking up in the back where the sofa had pushed it and his boxers and his bare chest and the flush that still hadn't gone all the way down. "I didn't know what it was going to be. I just knew I wanted to be in the room when it happened. Whatever it was."

Jim looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached over and picked up her phone off the cushion between them and handed it back to her, screen up.

"You should answer her," he said.

Wanda looked down at the little banner still sitting there, the one from Marcia, patient as a nurse, waiting to be touched.

Wanda touched the banner.

The messages app opened on Marcia, and Marcia had already been typing — the three little dots pulsing under her name, going still, pulsing again — and then the message came through whole.

Marcia: I have read it four times. I have questions. Question one: was it the whole finger or just the one knuckle.

Wanda laughed out loud, alone on the sofa, and Jim's head turned.

"That was Marcia," she said, and turned the phone so he couldn't see it.

Wanda: whole finger. to the second knuckle. i was bracing him up, he was stuck in downward dog, it was an accident the first time.

Marcia: the first time.

Wanda: the first time.

Marcia: WANDA.

Wanda: he clenched on it. i couldn't get it out. i had to spit on my hand.

Marcia: I am putting my phone down. I am picking it back up. Question two: did he finish.

Wanda looked at Jim. He was watching the resistance-band video with the fixed attention of a man who was not watching the resistance-band video, his water glass empty on the floor, his boxers tented enough that the cotton had a fold in it that hadn't been there ten minutes ago. She felt the low pull in her belly again, the same one from an hour ago, the one that had been sitting there since her finger had gone in and he'd made that sound.

Wanda: he came so hard he forgot his back hurt.

Marcia: I need to know if this is a thing you're doing again.

Wanda: we're doing it again tomorrow.

Marcia: I'm going to need a standing Thursday update.

Wanda: you already have one.

Marcia: I'm upgrading it.

Wanda: he says hi.

Marcia: he does not say hi. he's sitting there pretending not to know what you're typing.

Wanda: that's exactly what he's doing.

Marcia: tell him I'm not going to be weird on Monday. tell him I'm going to be SO normal. tell him I've already decided what I'm going to say and it's "good morning, Jim, nice weather."

Wanda: that's the weirdest thing you could say.

Marcia: I KNOW.

Wanda put the phone down on her thigh and looked at Jim, and Jim looked back, and she watched the question arrive in his face before he asked it.

"What's she saying," he said.

"She's being very normal about it."

"Is she."

"She's decided to greet you Monday with 'nice weather.'"

Jim closed his eyes. He let his head fall back against the sofa cushion and he made a sound like a man watching a bill come due. "I've known her eleven years," he said. "She's never once mentioned the weather."

"That's how you'll know she's rattled."

"Wanda."

"Mm."

"Are you enjoying this."

She thought about it honestly. "Yes," she said. "Not the part where Cousin Ruth commented amen. The rest of it, yes."

He opened one eye and looked at her sideways. "Cousin Ruth," he said, "is ninety-four years old, and she typed 'amen' with her own two thumbs, and she meant it."

"She's a woman of faith."

"She's a woman of Facebook." He sat up and reached for her phone, and she let him have it this time, and he scrolled up through the comments with his thumb moving slow, the way he read anything — the way he read a parts diagram, top to bottom, nothing skipped. "Okay," he said. "Here's a good one. 'Ma'am this is a Wendy's.'"

"That one's funny."

"This one's not." He turned the screen toward her. A woman Wanda didn't recognize, a profile picture of a cat, had written: This is a public platform and there are children on it. Some things belong in private.

Wanda read it and felt the little cold thing that always came with being told off, the thing that went back to Sister Agnes and the third grade and had never quite left. Then she read it again and the cold thing went away, because under it, three replies down, someone had already answered for her — ma'am this is a yoga video — and eleven people had liked that, and one of them had liked it so hard they'd replied with a second comment that just said ma'am.

"Jim," she said. "Jim, look at this one." She took the phone back and scrolled and found it. "A woman in Ohio wrote — okay, listen — 'I have been married twenty-six years and I have never once been able to get my husband to try anything new. Wanda, you are doing the Lord's work.'"

"The Lord's work."

"That's a lot of pressure," Jim said. "That's a lot of pressure for a Tuesday."

"There's more." She kept scrolling, reading them out loud as she went, one hand on the phone and one hand flat on his thigh, which had become, without either of them deciding it, the place her hand lived now. "'This is the most married thing I've ever read.' 'Ma'am, respectfully, this is a sex crime and also I'm jealous.' 'My wife and I do yoga too and now I'm scared.' 'Wanda, blink twice if you need help.' 'No she doesn't need help, she IS the help.'"

Jim was laughing again, the low rolling one, and this time he didn't try to stop it. "Read me the top one," he said. "The one with all the likes."

Wanda scrolled to the top of the thread and found it. The comment was from a woman named Renee, and it had a little blue check beside her name, and it had four hundred and twelve likes, which was, Wanda realized with a small vertiginous feeling, more likes than she had ever received on anything in her life, combined, including her daughter's wedding photos.

"Okay," Wanda said. "Renee says — 'I don't know who Wanda is but I know exactly who she is. Every woman I know has a version of this story and none of us ever tell it. Thank you for telling it. Also, ma'am, your husband is a lucky man and he knows it.'"

Jim was quiet for a second. Then he said, "That one's kind."

"That one's kind," Wanda agreed.

She read him two more — a young woman who wrote this is the future I want, and a man who wrote I showed this to my wife and she said "see" and now we're not speaking — and by then the thread had slowed, the counter in the corner of her screen ticking up one every minute or so instead of one every second, the wreck settling into a long slow pile of cars.

And then, without any fanfare at all, a notification slid down from the top of her screen that was not a comment and not a text.

It was a DM. From Lily.

Wanda looked at it for a long moment without touching it. The little circle with the face she'd been looking at on an eighty-inch screen for a month, the messy bun and the soft smile, sitting in the corner of her phone like a person who had walked into her living room.

"What," Jim said.

"She messaged me."

"Who messaged you."

"Lily."

Jim sat up straight. "The yoga Lily."

"There's only one Lily, Jim."

"Open it."

"I'm opening it."

She touched the notification and the message came up, and it was short, and she read it twice before she read it out loud, because she wanted to be sure she had it right.

Lily: Hi Wanda. I read your comment. I read all my comments, I wasn't kidding about that. I want to say thank you, and I want to say it without being weird about it. Most of what I get is people telling me my form is bad or asking what leggings I wear. Nobody ever tells me the truth. You told me the truth. I'm glad you and Jim had fun. That's what the practice is for, honestly — it's supposed to get you back into your body, and it sounds like it did. Tell Jim I hope his back feels better. And — this is the part I'm going to be weird about — I'm going to give you two a shout-out at the top of my next class. Just a little one. I won't say what you wrote. I'll just say hi to the couple in the living room with the big TV who do the videos together every night, and I'll say I hope they're having a good week. You'll know it's you. I hope that's okay. Lily.

Wanda read it out loud, all of it, and when she got to the end she sat there with the phone in both hands and did not say anything.

"She's going to shout us out," Jim said.

"She's going to shout us out."

"On her next class."

"At the top."

"Wanda, her classes get—" He stopped and did the math with his face. "How many people watch her."

"The last one said fourteen hundred live."

"Fourteen hundred people are going to hear about the couple with the big TV."

"They're not going to hear about us," Wanda said. "They're going to hear about a couple. A nice couple. Who do yoga." She was already typing back, thumbs moving, and she could feel her own face doing something she couldn't control. "I'm telling her yes."

"You're telling her yes."

"I'm telling her yes and thank you and that we'll be watching."

Wanda: yes. absolutely yes. we'll be watching. and lily — thank you for being kind about it. i know i put something out in public that maybe i shouldn't have. i'm not sorry i wrote it. i'm a little sorry i hit the wrong button. but you were kind about it and that meant something to me.

Jim watched her hit send. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "You told her you were sorry you hit the wrong button."

"I did."

"You're not sorry you hit the wrong button."

"I'm a little sorry," she said. "Not enough to mean it."

He laughed at that, and it came out easy, and she realized the knot that had been sitting in her chest since she'd seen the counter climb past four hundred was gone. She put her hand flat on his thigh again and left it there.

The phone buzzed in her other hand.

Marcia: update. did you see she messaged you. tell me you saw.

Wanda: i saw. i answered.

Marcia: WHAT DID SHE SAY.

Wanda read her the DM out loud, and then read her her own reply, and by the time she got to the end Marcia had sent four more messages in a row, each one shorter than the last, which was how Wanda knew she was genuinely losing her mind.

Marcia sent four more messages in the time it took Wanda to stand up — the first one all caps, the second one a single question mark, the third a screenshot of her own face with her mouth open, the fourth just the word Thursday — and Wanda read them all standing over the sofa with the phone in one hand and the other hand already reaching down for Jim.

"Come on," she said.

He looked up at her. "Come on where."

"Upstairs."

"Wanda, it's—" He checked the clock on the cable box, which said 10:47 in green numbers. "It's almost eleven."

"I know what time it is." She took his hand and pulled, and he came up off the sofa the way he always came up off furniture now, with a small grunt and a hand braced on his own knee, and she liked that too, she liked all of it, the thirty years of it, the grunt and the knee and the salt-and-pepper hair sticking up in back. "Bring your water."

"I finished my water."

"Then bring the glass."

He brought the glass. She led him past the kitchen and up the stairs with her hand wrapped around his, and the stairs creaked in the two places they'd always creaked, and the hall light was off and the bedroom door was open and the room beyond it was dark except for the window, where the streetlamp out front laid a long orange parallelogram across the foot of the bed. She'd made the bed that morning. She noticed that, the way you notice the small domestic facts at the edges of a moment that is about to stop being domestic.

She turned on the lamp on her side. Low. The one with the yellow shade.

"Sit," she said.

Jim sat on the edge of the mattress and set the glass on the nightstand and looked up at her with his hands on his knees, and there it was again, that flush, climbing his neck from under the collar line he didn't have because he wasn't wearing a collar, wasn't wearing anything but the boxers, and she stood in front of him in her sports bra and yoga pants with her ponytail coming loose and her phone in her hand, fifty years old, and felt — she was going to have to find a better word for it eventually — tall.

"Take those off," she said.

He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of the boxers and lifted his hips and worked them down and kicked them off the end of his foot, and his cock came free of the cotton already half-hard, thickening against his thigh, and she looked at it the way she'd looked at it for thirty years, which was to say with a nurse's frank attention and a wife's particular hunger, and then she reached behind her back and unclasped her bra and let it fall off her shoulders and down her arms.

Jim's mouth did something. She watched it do it.

"You've seen them," she said.

"I like seeing them."

"I know you do." She pushed the yoga pants down over her hips and stepped out of them and stood in front of him in her underwear, and then she took those off too, and Jim made a small sound in his throat that she had not heard in a while and had missed. She put one knee on the mattress beside his hip and then the other, and she straddled him, and his hands came up automatically to her waist, warm and broad and callused at the base of the fingers, and she settled down onto his thighs and felt his cock press up against the inside of her leg, hot and already slick at the tip.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

She leaned in and kissed him, and he kissed her back with his hands spreading over her hips, and she could feel the beat of him through the thin skin where their bodies met, and she reached down between them and wrapped her hand around his cock and stroked it once, root to tip, slow, and he broke the kiss to breathe against her mouth.

"Wanda—"

"Shh." She stroked him again. "I've got something to do."

She lifted up onto her knees, kept her hand around him, guided the head of his cock along the wet seam of her and let it sit there a second — just the pressure of it, just the blunt heat of it against her — and then she sank down onto him in one long slow motion, taking him all the way to the root, and both of them made a sound at the same time.

She held still. She always held still for a second at the start, let herself feel the shape of him inside her, the stretch of it, the fullness that never got old. Jim's hands were tight on her hips. His head had gone back and his throat was working.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

She picked up her phone off the mattress beside his hip.

Jim's eyes came open. "What are you doing."

"Reading to you."

"Reading what."

"The comments." She thumbed the screen awake and scrolled with her free hand while she started to move on him, a slow roll of her hips, forward and back, and Jim's breath caught and his fingers dug into her waist. "You said you wanted to know what she was saying."

"I said—" He swallowed. "I said I wanted to know what Marcia was saying."

"Marcia's boring. Marcia's just screaming. These are the good ones." She found the thread and scrolled down past the Wendy's joke and the woman in Ohio and the four hundred and twelve likes, and she settled on one and read it out loud while she rode him, slow, the words coming out in the same unhurried voice she used for reading the mail. "'I have been with my husband for nineteen years and last night I asked him to try something new and he said no and then he said yes and then he cried. Wanda, I think you broke something loose in the world.'"

Jim laughed — a strangled, breathless laugh — and his hips pushed up into her without his permission, and she felt it, felt the way his cock dragged inside her when he did it, and she made a low sound and kept going.

"That's a nice one," she said. "That's a real one. Nineteen years and he cried."

"Wanda—"

"Hold on, there's more." She scrolled. She was moving faster now, riding him in a steady rhythm, the slap of her thighs against his coming on every downstroke, and she had to hold the phone out to the side to keep it steady. "'My wife read this out loud to me at breakfast and then we had to leave the table.'" She laughed. "Breakfast. Imagine."

"Wanda, I can't—"

"You can. You're doing great." She leaned down and kissed the corner of his mouth and kept her hips working, and he grabbed her ass with both hands and pulled her down harder onto him and she let him, she let him set the depth, and then she took it back, slowing to a grind, circling her hips on him with him buried all the way, and Jim made a sound like a man being pulled apart in a good way.

"Next one," she said. "'I don't know what downward dog is and at this point I'm afraid to ask.'"

He laughed again, and the laugh turned into a groan halfway through, and his cock jumped inside her, and she felt the jump and filed it away and kept reading.

"'Wanda, my husband wants me to tell you that you're his hero.'" She scrolled. "'Wanda, my wife wants me to tell you that you're HER hero.'" She scrolled. "'Okay I read this to my boyfriend and he just said "so what's the problem" and I have never loved him more.'"

"Wanda," Jim said, and his voice had gone rough, "put the phone down."

She set the phone down on the mattress beside his hip, screen up, and put both hands flat on his chest and rode him the way she rode him when she wanted to finish it — no more reading voice, no more slow roll, just the steady hard drop of her hips and the slap that came with it and the sound of her own breath getting away from her.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked at her. His eyes were wet at the corners and his mouth was open and his hands had gone from her hips to her ass to her back and back down again like he couldn't decide where to hold on, and she leaned down over him and let her tits drag across his chest and kissed him with her hips still working.

He came with his hands clamped on her ribs and his heels dug into the mattress and a sound that started in his chest and came out of his throat broken in the middle. She felt it — the jump, the pulse, the heat of it filling her — and she kept moving through it, grinding down onto him until he made a sound like a woman, and she had never once in thirty years heard him make that sound, and she wanted to hear it again before she died.

She held still on top of him while he came down. His breathing was ragged under her hands. The lamp made a yellow circle on the wall and the streetlamp made its orange parallelogram on the foot of the bed and neither of them said anything for a while.

"Well," he said finally. "That was the confidence explained."

She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead down on his chest.

He got up to pee and brought back a washcloth from the hall bathroom, warm, and handed it to her without ceremony, and she cleaned herself up sitting on the edge of the bed with the sheet pulled across her lap, and he sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders and they sat like that in the low yellow light like two people on a bench at a bus stop.

"Your back okay," she said.

"My back's fine."

"Your everything okay."

He was quiet a second. Then: "I don't know what I am. I'm something."

"That's a good answer." She reached over and turned off the lamp and they lay down in the dark with the window open and the streetlamp coming through the blinds in stripes, and she could hear him thinking, and she let him think.

In the morning the phone was still on the mattress between them and the battery was at nine percent and the notification badge on the Facebook app said one hundred and six.

"Oh, Jesus," Jim said, when she showed him.

"It's not that bad."

"Wanda, that's a hundred and six people."

"Some of them are the same people twice." She scrolled with her thumb while the coffee brewed downstairs, and he stood behind her at the counter with his mug in both hands and read over her shoulder, and the first one she stopped on was from a woman named Carla who had gone to nursing school with her in 1994 and who had written: I have known you for thirty years and I did not know you had this in you and I am DELIGHTED.

"Carla," Wanda said. "Carla from the reunion."

"Carla who threw up in the parking lot."

"That's the one."

There was one from Marcia, timestamped 11:52 the night before, that said I have read this thread four times and I have questions and I am getting answers on Thursday whether you like it or not, and then a second one from Marcia at 6:14 that morning that said Jim I know you're reading this and I want you to know I mean every word.

"She means every word," Jim said.

"She does."

"What word."

"All of them."

He drank his coffee and looked at the window over the sink, where the yard was doing its late-summer thing, the grass going brown at the edges and the maple starting to turn, and Wanda watched him look at it and knew he was doing the arithmetic he always did, which was: what does this cost me, and who knows, and is it worth it. He'd done it the year he bought the motorcycle and the year he quit the second job and the year he'd said no to the promotion that would have moved them to Ohio.

"It's worth it," she said, before he could ask.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say something."

He put his mug down and turned around and leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed and looked at her the way he looked at a piece of furniture he was about to fix — patient, unhurried, like the answer would come if he stood there long enough. "You know what I was going to say."

"Yeah."

"And?"

"And I already told you." She came around the counter and stood in front of him and put her hands flat on his chest the way she'd put them the night before, and he uncrossed his arms and put them around her and she fit under his chin the way she always had, and for a minute neither of them said anything and the coffee maker gurgled its last.

"Tonight," she said into his shirt. "Same time. Same channel."

"Same deal?"

"Same deal." She tipped her head back to look at him. "And this time you say it out loud."

"Say what out loud."

"What you're looking at."

He made a face — the face he made when he was pretending not to want something he wanted — and she poked him in the ribs and he flinched and laughed and the laugh was the same laugh it had always been, and that was the thing she kept coming back to, that underneath all of it he was still just Jim, still the man who fixed the dryer without being asked and blushed when the waitress sang him happy birthday, and she had been married to him for thirty years and she was going to find out what was underneath the rest of him if it took the next thirty.

The phone buzzed on the counter. Marcia again, one word: WEATHER.

"What does that mean," Jim said.

"Nothing. Inside joke. You'll find out Monday."

"What's Monday."

"Monday's Monday." She picked up her mug and drank the last of her coffee and set it in the sink and went to get dressed for the day, and behind her she heard him pick up his own mug and rinse it and set it in the rack the way he always did, and she heard the small domestic music of him moving around the kitchen, the cabinet door, the drawer with the spoons, and she stood in the doorway a second with her back to him and let it land on her, all of it, the whole ridiculous morning, the thread, the hundred and six, the deal, the man at the sink.

Then she went upstairs to find her yoga pants, because tonight was tonight, and she was going to need them.