The laptop was open because he is the kind of person who never closes laptops.

I had walked into the living room to ask him if he wanted miso or chicken broth. There was a fridge full of vegetables I hadn't decided on. I was going to make us soup. It was Tuesday and I had finished the last of the Wednesday-Thursday wedding centerpieces and Priya had left at six and I had taken a hot shower and put on the sweatshirt that has my mother's college on it, and I had walked past Ethan, who was on the couch with his phone, FaceTime audio, his AirPods chiming softly every time someone in the call laughed.

"Babe," I said. "Miso or chicken."

He held up a finger. The universal one second finger. The finger he holds up at me approximately fourteen times per evening. I logged it the way you log the rain. It does not occur to me, anymore, to feel something about it.

The laptop was on the coffee table. Open. The browser had a tab in the second slot from the right that said Instagram and underneath that it said @SmallBatchSecrets.

I am not the kind of person who looks at her boyfriend's laptop. I am the kind of person who refuses, on principle, to look at her boyfriend's laptop. There is a whole philosophy I have about it. I once gave a forty-minute speech about it to my friend Hannah, the year we were twenty-six, after she went through a man's phone and found a girl named Shay. I said: if you have to look, you already know.

So I have not, in four years, looked.

I looked.

I looked because the post on his screen said Verse & Vase February, depression manifested as foliage and the photograph next to it was the sympathy arrangement I had made for the Donovan family on the second Tuesday of February. I had made it for Mr. Donovan, whose wife was named Lillian, who liked white anemones, who had been in hospice for nine days. I had charged him below cost. He had cried in my studio.

The post had forty-seven thousand likes.

I am not making this up, because I read the comments. I read all of them. I read forty-seven thousand likes' worth of I'm dying lmao and not the foliage and small business owners need to chill and oh my god the wreath one tho, and beneath that comment was a thumbnail of a wreath I had made in November for a child's funeral, with the caption grief looks like a Pinterest board, and my hand was very still on the laptop, and Ethan said, from the couch, "Babe, you good?"

He could not see the screen from where he was sitting. He could only see my back.

"Yeah," I said.

I closed the tab. The way you close any tab. With the X.

There were seventeen other tabs. One of them was titled Drafts (47).

"What sounds good for dinner," I said. "Miso or chicken."

"Chicken. Cool if I just eat after, though, I'm in this thing."

"Cool."

I went into the kitchen. I put the broth on. I cut a carrot. I cut a second carrot. I cut a third carrot. Somewhere on the counter was the gold ribbon I had brought home from the studio for a sample, I had been going to redo the website hero image with a different ribbon, and somewhere in my head was a sentence I have known the shape of since I was nine years old, since the first time my mother locked herself in the bathroom for six hours and I had to make the school lunches anyway.

The sentence is this:

How long can I keep my face still.

The carrot smelled like a carrot.

I cut it.

The miso paste was in the back of the fridge. I had been wrong about which broth. I made miso anyway. I added the carrots. I added a handful of greens. I stirred it slowly because slowly was the only speed I had access to.

In my pocket, my phone was on. I opened it under the counter, not because I needed to hide it, but because I knew, suddenly, that I was going to need both hands free. I opened Instagram. I went to the search bar. I typed @SmallBatchSecrets.

50.1K followers. Two years of posts. The bio said we love you, but no.

Almost fifty of those posts were arrangements I had made.

Some of them I recognized from the photograph alone. Some of them I recognized only from the captions, the way a person recognizes their own handwriting in a stranger's notebook. The Halloran wedding. The Choi anniversary. The wreath from November for the boy's funeral. A hospice arrangement from October. A quiet Sunday delivery I had done for a man who was about to ask his wife if she would still marry him after twenty-eight years.

Underneath each post: between two thousand and forty-seven thousand likes. Comments by the hundred. Names I half-recognized, wedding clients, customers, three brides, two women who had ordered weekly arrangements for their offices for the better part of a year.

I scrolled until the soup was at a simmer. I let the soup simmer. I did not make a sound.

In the living room, Ethan laughed at something the FaceTime had said. The laugh was the laugh he uses around his college friends. It is a different register than the laugh he uses with me. I had clocked the difference between the two laughs in year two. Around month seventeen, I think. Some things you log on the way past, like rain.

I scrolled until I hit the first post. Two years and one month ago.

launching @SmallBatchSecrets, a place for people tired of pretending small business owners are doing god's work. they're not. some of them are scammers. some of them just have bad taste. we love you, but no.

The first arrangement he had ever posted was a bouquet I had made for our anniversary that month. He had brought it to me with a kiss and said it was perfect. He had photographed it before he gave it to me. The caption: the kind of bouquet that says nothing is wrong.

It had three hundred and twelve likes.

I went back into the living room. I pulled my hair into a knot at the back of my head. The fluorescent light over the kitchen island flickered the way it has flickered since November because I have been meaning to replace the bulb. I have been meaning, for nine months, to replace the bulb. I have been meaning, for nine months, to do a lot of things.

Ethan was still on the couch. He looked up. He smiled the way he smiles. He took out one AirPod.

"Soup smells good," he said.

"Almost done."

"You're a saint."

"I know."

I went back to the kitchen. I lowered the heat. I took out two bowls. The good ones, the ones we got from his mother for Christmas the first year, the ones I had carried home from Connecticut on the train wrapped in three sweatshirts. I ladled soup into both of them. I cut the second loaf of the bread Priya had given me at the studio and I put it on a plate. I put the bowls and the bread on the coffee table. I sat down beside him.

He touched the top of my head, briefly, the way you touch a thing you own.

I opened the notes app on my phone, in the lap-shadow, and I scrolled to the bottom of the running list I have called evidence since I was nineteen years old, since the first apartment with the first roommate who used to eat my groceries, the list that has lived in every phone I have owned since then, the list of things I have noticed and decided not to do anything about.

I added: 46. Forehead kiss after the laptop. 11:32 PM.

He said, "What?"

"Nothing," I said.

"You good?"

"Yeah."

I ate my soup.

I did not look at the laptop again. I did not need to. I had screenshots already, fourteen of them, in a folder on my phone called receipts. I had made the folder while the soup simmered. I had named it without thinking. I had taken every screenshot with the volume off, because the click of an iPhone screenshot is a sound he would have heard from the couch.

At 11:50, he yawned. He stretched. He carried our bowls to the sink. He squeezed my shoulder on the way past and said, "You're the best."

I said, "I know."

I went into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed. I took the sweatshirt off, and I put on a t-shirt that I have owned for eight years, and I lay down on my side facing the wall, and I let the screen of my phone go dark in my hand.

He came in fifteen minutes later. He brushed his teeth in the bathroom that has more of his moisturizer in it than my anything. He climbed in beside me. He rolled over. Within ninety seconds he was asleep.

I lay there with my eyes open. I lay there for a very long time.

Outside the bedroom window, somewhere on Fifth Avenue, a Brooklyn bus exhaled at the stop and pulled away. The radiator clicked. The Eero light pulsed in the corner of the dark.

In my head, again, the sentence I have carried since I was nine.

How long can I keep my face still.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

Sleep was not what I was doing.