The first caption appeared beneath the line of light under my daughter’s bedroom door.

[A CHILDHOOD ENDS IN THE NEXT ROOM.]

It was 12:43 in the morning. I was carrying a basket of clean laundry past her room. Behind the door, nothing moved. No crying, no floorboard creak, no small electronic chime. I opened it anyway.

She was asleep on her side, twelve years old, one arm around the stuffed rabbit she had once dragged through airports by the ear. Her phone lay facedown beside her. Moonlight made a pale bar across the carpet. I stood there waiting for the sentence to revise itself.

It did not.

For several days I blamed my eyes. A retinal migraine, burn-in from the television, some private defect in the machinery. But the words had not floated. They had occupied the bottom of the doorway with the clean authority of subtitles, white letters held inside black brackets. They belonged to what I was seeing, though nothing I was seeing explained them.

Three months later, my husband and I sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of cherries between us. He folded the grocery receipt into smaller and smaller squares. I read the same paragraph in a magazine until the words lost meaning. Our knees nearly touched.

[TWO PEOPLE BECOME STRANGERS WITHOUT MOVING.]

He looked up. “Are we out of detergent?”

“I think so,” I said.

That was all.

I reached across the table and put my hand over his. He glanced at it with gentle concern, the way one might regard a bird that had flown indoors. Neither of us pulled away. Neither of us moved closer.

He told me he had rented an apartment. We spent an hour trying to decide when the marriage had ended.

We named the winter he had slept in the guest room because of his back. The summer I traveled alone to my sister’s. The night we argued in a hotel parking lot, then forgot what the argument had been about. We kept looking for the sound of something breaking.

I did not tell him I had seen the exact moment. I had seen it, but I had not experienced it.

After my husband moved out, I left his blue mug beside the sink. His coat stayed in the hall closet through two changes of weather. The dish by the door held his spare key and a coin from a country neither of us remembered visiting. I told myself I had not decided what to do with these things.

One evening, I came home and saw the last sunlight lying on the empty half of our bed.

[THE HOUSE CEASES TO EXPECT HIS RETURN.]

I was furious.

The house had no right to give him up before I did. I carried his mug from the sink to the counter, then back again. I opened the closet so his coat would be visible. I turned on the porch light though it was not yet dark.

The porch light stayed on through dinner. My daughter noticed it when she took out the trash.

“Is Dad coming?”

“No.”

She waited by the trash can with the lid in her hand.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She let the lid fall.

The next afternoon he texted to ask for his coat. He would pick it up on Saturday. Could I leave it on the porch if I was out?

I typed that I would be home, then deleted it. I asked what time.

At ten on Saturday I put the coat over the back of a kitchen chair. At eleven I moved it to the hall. I had filled his mug before remembering he had stopped taking sugar.

When his car pulled up, I was at the front door before he reached it.

“You’ve left the light on,” he said.

I looked at the bulb above us. In daylight I could barely tell.

He held out his hand for the coat. I gave it to him. He put it on while we spoke about our daughter’s field trip, the deposit, whose weekend it fell on. One cuff had folded under. I reached to straighten it and he turned his wrist to help me.

“Do you want to come in?”

He glanced toward his car.

I looked down at the bottom of the doorframe and waited. Nothing appeared there.

“Just for a minute,” he said.

I stepped back. He wiped his shoes on the mat for longer than they needed.