Oliver hadn’t seen Callie in months. Callie said it’d be easier this way to resist the temptation. Callie said it was hard enough just talking to him on the phone, although they still talked on the phone every day. “It wasn’t our fault,” he told her. “We didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, but she didn’t really believe him.

It had been her idea to try to find her mother. She’d been adopted when she was still a baby, and she’d said now that she and Oliver were married, now that she had a family of her own, she wanted to find the family that had given her up. Oliver hadn’t understood. He’d been adopted himself, but he hadn’t been as lucky as Callie. He didn’t like to talk about it, but Callie knew he’d been mistreated, and eventually the state had taken him away and put him in foster care. Outside of Callie, Oliver didn’t have a very high opinion of family.

They’d met when they were thirty. They were both Aquarians, and not that they knew much about that kind of thing but it seemed to matter. They said it was like they had known each other all their lives, like there was this fire between them, like they were living in a bubble and the rest of the world didn’t matter anymore. They finished each other’s sentences. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone when they decided to move in together, or when, a month later, they got married. The wedding was a small affair in the Catholic Church where Callie had gone as a child. They didn’t invite more than a handful of guests and her adoptive father gave her away.

For their honeymoon they went to Niagara Falls. They thought they could do with a little conventional tradition, but they might just as well have gone to Indiana or stayed at home for all they saw. They didn’t once leave their hotel room. They stayed in bed and ordered room service and named their unborn children, and talked about their past relationships with the same throwaway flippancy as what they’d eaten for breakfast that morning.

It wasn’t long after the honeymoon that Callie came home one day with a packet of paperwork from the adoption agency.

“What’s that?” asked Oliver. “Why would you want to do that?” He didn’t understand.

“I guess I just feel like it’s time now,” said Callie. “I don’t think I was ready before. I feel like I was waiting for something, only I didn’t know what it was. But now I think I’ve found it. Now I feel it’s time. I thought you of all people would understand, Ollie,” she said. “Wouldn’t you want to meet your mother? Your father? Don’t you wonder?”

Oliver shook his head. He had no desire to meet either of his parents. He didn’t think of them any more than he thought of the boy who delivered their newspaper. Less, even. The way he saw it, every outcome this could lead to was unfavorable and best to be avoided.

“Go ahead and do it if you really want to, but keep me out of it,” he said. “I don’t want to be involved.”

After that Oliver figured the subject was closed as far as he was concerned and they could get back to loving each other. And that’s the way it was for a while. Things went on as they had before and they were just as mad about each other as ever. Then one day he came home from work and found Callie seated at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked cigarettes since before they’d met.

She had been crying. When she saw Oliver she began crying again. He sat down at the table across from her. He still had his briefcase in his hands. He stood up again and looked out the window. The neighborhood children were outside playing hopscotch, and Oliver watched them, mesmerized: a little girl and a little boy. A brother and his sister. They were skipping, they were jumping, they were trying not to fall. Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off them.

After the annulment, Oliver and Callie tried to hide their secret, telling their friends they’d just had a falling out, that they shouldn’t have rushed into things. But it was a small town, and somehow word got around. The judge couldn’t hold his peace or the county clerk was a gossip. At church, people stared at them like they were sinners, like they should have known better. They whispered words like “unnatural,” and “abomination.” Eventually Oliver and Callie stopped going to church altogether. Oliver got a hotel room during the interim and eventually they moved out of the house they were renting and got new separate apartments and cell phones. They got the family plan.

“I suppose it makes sense,” she said.

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night. Oliver was in his armchair with a beer talking on the phone to Callie. He’d been in the apartment for nearly two months and it still felt new and temporary. “What makes sense?” he asked.

“The way we, you know, felt when we first met each other, to have confused that with love. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think any of it makes a goddamned bit of sense,” he said. “What about Thanksgiving?”

“Thanksgiving? Oh Ollie, Thanksgiving was just—I think we were just saying goodbye to each other on Thanksgiving,” she said. “That’s all I think Thanksgiving was.”

Their marriage had already been annulled. Oliver had come over to help finish packing. Their boxes were already off to their respective new apartments when they decided to take a break for the holiday. They cooked a turkey and made mashed potatoes. Oliver made his green bean casserole and Callie baked a pumpkin pie and they opened up the two bottles of champagne left over from their wedding. It was enough food to feed a family and they did their best to make up for the absence.

When they were finished eating they took what was left of the second bottle and went to the living room. All the furniture had already been packed up and they both sat down on the rug. “Ugh,” groaned Callie. “I ate too much.”

“Don’t even talk about food,” said Oliver. “If I never see food again until the day I die, it’ll be too soon.”

They were both lying down on their backs. They didn’t say anything. Within twenty minutes it had grown dark, but neither stood up to turn on the light. It was the first moment they’d had since their world had exploded to stop, to breathe, to share in each other’s company without some distraction between them. It was the first time they’d seen each other in private.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Oliver said finally. “Usually people grow apart or they don’t. They fall out of love with each other or they live the rest of their lives together. But this, it just doesn’t seem fair! It’s like a death, like one of us died, only here we both still are, haunting each other. You’re like a ghost, Callie.”

She reached out in the dark for his hand. “I know,” she said.

“And who’s to say it’s wrong, anyway?” He squeezed her hand so tight she thought he was going to break it. She squeezed back. They hadn’t had sex since before that day of course, that terrible day with the cigarettes. They hadn’t talked about it then, and they didn’t talk about it now. Oliver leaned over in the dark and found her face, her lips. He kissed her. Maybe it was the dark that allowed them to do this now, maybe the holiday, but she didn’t pull away. Why should she? A month before they had been man and wife. This was natural, they thought. This was right. The other was forgotten.

There was no awkwardness as they pulled off each other’s clothes, but there was haste. Before the champagne wore off, before the other stopped and said, “No. Stop. Wait. What will the neighbors think?” they had to get this done. No one stopped. No one said anything. He said, “I love you,” and she said, “You mean the world to me,” and when they were done, he held her in his arms and she kissed him on the forehead. She asked, “Where do we go from here?”

The crazy thing, what was so tragic and wonderful at the same time, was that the fire was still there. And it wasn’t just familiarity, despite whatever Callie said. The blood running through their veins was now just one more thing they shared, and that it had also torn them apart was just what was wrong with everything, he thought.

He heard her go outside, and then the sound of her lighting up a cigarette, and then her breath against the receiver as she exhaled. “What we did,” she said, “you don’t think it was wrong, do you?”

“Of course not!”

“Because the way they look at me sometimes,” she continued, “it’s like I’m a monster!”

Oliver stood up and sat back down. The telephone was an ineffective medium. “Well fuck them, Callie,” he said. “Fuck what they think.”

“I know, Ollie,” she said. “It’s just that I have to live in their world, you know? So do you.”

“No,” he shook his head. “This is no kind of world for me. I might as well become a eunuch. I might as well go off to the mountains and join some monastery and pray to Allah or Buddha or Jesus H. Christ for all this world’s done for me. I might as well throw myself right off a cliff,” he said. “Callie? Callie, tell me, what are you wearing?”

“Ollie, stop. We can’t talk like that anymore, okay? We can’t. It’s wrong,” she said. “It can’t lead to anything good. Father O’Malley says we shouldn’t even talk to each other right now. Father O’Malley says we need space from each other. Distance. Until we figure this out.”

“To hell with Father O’Malley,” said Oliver. “You never should have gone back.”

“Oliver! Don’t talk like that!” There was a weight on the other end of the line. “Have you called her yet, Ollie? Have you called the number I gave you?”

“No.”

“I wish you would. She’s waiting to hear from you. She has so many things she wants to say to you.”

“I don’t have anything I want to say to her.”

“Oh Ollie—”

“Callie. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay? I don’t.”

“Okay, Ollie,” she said. He could just imagine the expression on her face. She was silent, they were both silent, for a minute, five minutes, it was hard to tell. When they first separated this was what they did. Oliver would call Callie or Callie would call Oliver and they’d just sit on the phone and not say a word, listening to each other’s breath. Oliver thought it was like they were learning to listen to each other’s thoughts.

“Hey Ollie?” she whispered. “Are you still there?” She thought he might have fallen asleep.

“I’m still here,” he said. “I haven’t gone anywhere. No mountaintop monastery yet.”

“Oh good,” she sighed. “I just looked at the clock and guess what time it is? It’s after midnight, Ollie. So happy birthday, I guess. I love you.”

“I love you too, Callie,” he said. “Happy birthday.”