The sofa was a Restoration Hardware, the color called Dune, chosen during a phase when she believed people would come over on Saturdays. The cushions still held their shape. She'd bought a special brush for the fabric and used it twice.
The gap behind the sofa held a single gold hoop she'd turned the whole bathroom over looking for, a Cheerio welded to the floor like a tiny fossil, and the small black remote with the cracked battery door she'd blamed her husband for losing. She picked up the remote first. Channel 4 had a little red X where the number used to be. She set it on the cushion anyway - next to the special brush.
She sent him a single emoji - the couch one, which she hadn't known existed until autocomplete offered it - and heard his feet on the stairs before she'd set the phone down. They lifted without talking, her end catching the doorframe so a little ghost of Dune-colored lint came off on the white paint. The four pale squares left in the carpet looked like something had been buried there. She stood on one of them while Marcus pushed the sofa flush against the window wall, and the afternoon came through the glass and landed on the cushions the way it had never once landed on the cushions before.
Marcus dropped onto the cushion and the Dune fabric went gold in the window light, his hands on his knees - his face toward the glass. The yellow-green chair sat in the corner where it had always sat, but from here Diane could see the book she'd been looking for since March wedged under its back leg, doing the work of a shim.
She got her hip under the yellow-green armrest and walked it six inches, the feet leaving four short drag marks in the pile. The mug was the wide one from the orchard trip, the handle stained brown on the inside where she never quite got it clean - and she set it on the arm the way she'd set it on a counter, just set it there. It left a faint ring on the fabric, pale and wet. She looked at the ring for a second and didn't get a coaster.
The late light had gone the color of weak tea, and the end table stood where it used to stand, close enough that Marcus's mother - walking in, would have seen nothing different and said so. Diane's reading glasses - the ones with the tortoiseshell arm repaired with a strip of clear tape, slightly yellowed - were on the sofa arm where she'd set them to move the chair, and she looked at them there, and then at the end table - and then she went to the kitchen and came back with the wine.
