Jake told me our relationship has its own valence. Valence. That's the word he used.

If that's true, then relationships can change from one afternoon to evening, from hour to hour. Lying in bed is one thing. When we eat breakfast together and when it's early, we don't speak a lot. I like to talk, even just a bit. It helps me wake up. Especially if the conversation is funny. Nothing wakes me up like a laugh, really, even just one big laugh, as long as it's sincere. It's better than caffeine.

Jake prefers to eat his cereal or toast and read, mostly in quiet. He's always reading. Lately it's that Cocteau book. He must have reread it five times by now.

But he also just reads whatever's available. At first I thought he was quiet at breakfast because he was so into whatever book he was reading. I could understand that, though it's not how I operate. I wouldn't ever read this way. I like to know I have a good bit of time set aside for reading, to really get into the story. I don't like reading and eating, not together.

But it's the reading just for the sake of it that I find irritating. Jake will read anything-a newspaper, a magazine, a cereal box, a c.r.a.ppy flyer, a take-out menu, anything.

"Hey, do you think secrets are inherently unfair, or bad or immoral in a relationship?" I ask.

He's caught off guard. He looks at me, then back to the road.

"I don't know. It would depend on the secret. Is it significant? Is there more than one secret? How many are there? And what is being hidden? All relationships have secrets, though, don't you think? Even in lifelong relationships, and fifty-year marriages, there are secrets."

On the fifth morning we had breakfast together I stopped trying to start up a discussion. I didn't make any jokes. I sat. I ate cereal. Jake's brand. I looked around the room. I watched him. I observed. I thought: This is good. This is how we really get to know each other.

He was reading a magazine. There was a faint white film or residue under his bottom lip, concentrated in the corners of his mouth, in the valley where the top and bottom lips meet. This happened most mornings, this white lip film. After he showered, it was usually gone.

Was it toothpaste? Was it from breathing out of his mouth all night? Was it the mouth equivalent of eye boogers? When he read, he chewed very slowly, as if to conserve energy, as if concentrating on the words slowed his ability to swallow. Sometimes there was a long delay between the last revolution of his jaw and his swallow.

He'd wait for a bit and then dig out another overflowing spoonful from his bowl, holding it up absentmindedly. I thought he might drip milk onto his chin; each spoon was so full. But he didn't. He got it all into his mouth without a single drip. He rested the spoon in the bowl and wiped at his chin, even though there was nothing on it. It was all done distractedly.

His jaw is very taut and muscular. Even now. Even while sitting, driving.

How can I stop myself from thinking about eating breakfast with him twenty or thirty years from now? Would he still get that white residue every day? Would it be worse? Does everyone in a relationship think about this stuff? I watched him swallow-that prominent Adam's apple, more a gnarled peach pit stuck in his throat.

Sometimes post-eating, usually after a large meal, his body makes sounds like a cooling car after a long drive. I can hear liquids shifting through small s.p.a.ces. This doesn't happen so much at breakfast, more often after supper.

I hate to dwell on these things. They're unimportant and ba.n.a.l, but now's the time to think about them before this relationship gets any more serious. This makes me crazy, though, right? I'm crazy for thinking about this stuff?

Jake is smart. He'll be a full professor before long. Full tenure and all that. This stuff's appealing. It makes a good life. He's tall. He has his clumsy physical appeal. He's attractively misanthropic. All things I would have wanted in a husband when I was younger. Checks in all the boxes. I'm just not sure what any of this means now that I'm watching him eat cereal and hearing his body make hydraulic noises.

"Do you think your parents have secrets?" I ask.

"Absolutely. I'm sure they do. They'd have to."

The weirdest part-and it's some pretty unalloyed irony, as Jake would say-is that I can't say anything to him about my doubts. They have everything to do with him, and he's the one person I'm not comfortable talking to about them. I won't say anything until I'm sure it's over. I can't. What I'm questioning involves both of us, affects both of us, yet I can only decide alone. What does that say about relationships? Another in the long line of early-relationship contradictions.

"Why all the questions about secrets?"

"No reason," I say. "Just thinking."

Maybe I should simply enjoy this trip. Not overthink it. Get out of my own head. Have fun; let things happen naturally.

I don't know what this means-"let things happen naturally"-but I've heard it over and over. People say it to me a lot about relationships. Isn't that what we're doing? I'm letting myself consider these thoughts. It's natural. I'm not going to prevent doubts from blooming. Wouldn't that be more unnatural?

I ask myself what my reasons are for ending things and have trouble coming up with anything substantial. But how can you not ask this question in a relationship? What's here to keep it going? To make it worthwhile? Mostly, I just think I'd be better off without Jake, that it makes more sense than going on. I'm not certain, though. How can I be certain? I've never broken up with a boyfriend before.

Most relationships I've been in were like a carton of milk reaching its expiration date. It gets to a certain point and just sours, not inducing sickness but enough to notice a change in flavor. Maybe instead of wondering about Jake, I should be questioning my ability to experience pa.s.sion. This could all be my fault.

"Even when it's cold like this, if it's clear," Jake's saying, "I don't mind. You can always bundle up. There's something about the deep cold that's refreshing."

"Summer's better," I say. "I hate being cold. We still have at least another month before spring. It's going to be a long month."

"I saw Venus without a telescope one summer."

Such a Jake thing to say.

"It was one night around sunset. It wasn't going to be visible from Earth again for more than a hundred years. It was this very rare planetary alignment that coordinated the sun and Venus, so you could see it as a tiny black dot when it pa.s.sed between Earth and the sun. It was really cool."

"If I'd known you then, you could have told me about it. I missed out."

"That's the thing; no one seemed to care," he says. "It was so strange. A chance to see Venus, and most people were watching TV. No offense if that's what you were doing."

I know Venus is the second planet from the sun. I don't know much about it beyond that. "Do you like Venus?" I ask.

"Sure."

"Why? Why do you like it?"

"One day on Venus is like one hundred fifteen Earth days. Its atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and it has an iron core. It's also full of volcanoes and solidified lava, sort of like Iceland. I should know its...o...b..tal velocity, but I'd be making it up."

"That's pretty good," I say.

"But what I like most is that apart from the sun and moon, it's the brightest object in the sky. Most people don't know that."

I like when he talks like this.

I want to hear more. "Were you always interested in s.p.a.ce?"

"I don't know," he says. "I guess so. In s.p.a.ce, everything has its relative position. s.p.a.ce is an ent.i.ty, right, but also limitless. It's less dense the farther out you go, but you can always keep going. There's no definitive border between the start and the end. We'll never fully understand or know it. We can't."

"You don't think?"

"Dark matter makes up the majority of all matter, and it's still a mystery."

"Dark matter?"

"It's invisible. It's all the extra ma.s.s we can't see that makes the formation of galaxies and the rotational velocities of stars around galaxies mathematically possible."

"I'm glad we don't know everything."

"You're glad?"

"That we don't know all the answers, that we can't explain it all, like s.p.a.ce. Maybe we're not supposed to know all the answers. Questions are good. They're better than answers. If you want to know more about life, how we work, how we progress, it's questions that are important. That's what pushes and stretches our intellect. I think questions make us feel less lonely and more connected. It's not always about knowing. I appreciate not knowing. Not knowing is human. That's how it should be, like s.p.a.ce. It's unsolvable, and it's dark," I say, "but not entirely."

He laughs at this, and I feel silly for saying what I said.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm not laughing at you, it's just funny. I haven't heard anyone say it like that before."

"But it's true, isn't it?"

"Yeah. It's dark, but not entirely. It's true. And that's kind of a nice idea."

-Some of the rooms were vandalized, I heard.

-Yup, paint on the floor, red paint; some water damage. Did you know he put a chain on the door?

-Why did he do it in here?

-To make some selfish, twisted point, maybe. I don't know.

-He wasn't a vandal type, was he?

-No, but the strange thing is he'd started writing graffiti on some of the walls. We all knew it was him. People saw him doing it. He denied it, but volunteered to clean it off every time.

-That's weird.

-That's not even the weird part.

-What?

-The strange part was that he wrote the same thing every time. The graffiti. Just one sentence.

-What was it?

-"There's only one question we need to resolve."

-There's only one question we need to resolve?

-Yup. That's what he wrote.

-What's the one question?

-I have no idea.

"We still have a while to go, right?"

"Yeah, a bit longer."

"How about a story?"

"A story?"

"Yeah, to pa.s.s the time," I say. "I'll tell you a story. A true one. One you've never heard. It's your kind of story. I think you'll like it."

I turn the music down a little.

"Sure," he says.

"It's about when I was younger, a teenager."

I look over at him. At a table, he often looks slouchy and uncomfortable. Driving, he looks too long to fit comfortably behind the wheel, but his posture is good. I'm attracted to Jake's physical stature through his intellect. His sharpness of mind makes his lankiness appealing. They're connected. At least to me.

"Ready," he says. "For story time."

I clear my throat super dramatically.

"Okay. I'd been sheltering my head with some newspaper. Seriously. What? Why are you smiling? It was pouring. I'd grabbed the paper from an empty seat on the bus. My instructions had been simple: arrive at the house at ten thirty and you will be greeted in the driveway. I was told I didn't need to ring the bell. You're listening, right?"

He nods, still looking out the windshield at the road ahead.

"When I got there, I had to wait for a while-minutes, not seconds. When the door finally opened, a man I'd never met poked his head out. He looked up at the sky and then said something like he hoped I hadn't been waiting long. He held out a hand palm up. He looked exhausted, as if he'd been awake for days. Big dark bags under both eyes. Stubble on his cheeks and chin. Bedhead. I tried to glance past him. The door was open slightly, a crack.

"He said: 'I'm Doug. Gimme a minute, take the keys,' and he flipped me the keys, which I caught like a punch, both my hands against my stomach. The door slammed shut.

"I didn't move, not at first. I was stunned. Who was this guy? I really didn't know anything about him. We'd talked on the phone, that's it. I looked down at the metal key chain in my hands, which was just a large letter J."

I stop. I glance at Jake. "You look bored," I say. "I know I'm including lots of details, but I remember them, and I'm trying to tell a proper story. Is it weird that I remember these details? Is it boring because I'm telling you everything?"

"Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going."

"I'm not sure I agree with that, about memory. But I know what you mean," I say.

"Keep going," he says. "I'm listening."

"It was another eight minutes, at least two watch checks, before Doug reappeared. He fell into the pa.s.senger seat with a big exhale. He'd changed into worn blue jeans with holes in the knees and a plaid shirt. The seats in his car were mottled with orange cat hair. There was cat hair everywhere."

"Mottled."

"Yes, mottled to the nth degree. He was also wearing a black baseball cap, tipped back on his head, with the word Nucleus embroidered on the front in white cursive lettering. He seemed better suited to sitting than standing or walking.