He now had everything he needed until the final moment stored inside this house he’d purchased and maintained as a well-kept secret. Whenever that final moment should arrive, he realized, he might feel as if he needed more; but the moment and the need would pass unnoticed by anyone but him.

He’d spent weeks stockpiling what little food he required. Food no longer held much interest for him. At times he wondered why he bothered himself with the effort to nibble on a piece of fruit or heat up a bowl of last night’s canned stew. His tongue gave up some time ago conveying to his brain a sense of taste. Force of habit, that must be his reason for all the chewing and swallowing he performed; because as the unavoidable hour approached, reason advised him that leaving the world he’d known, in one way or another, for seventy painful years did not require a full stomach.

On the evening of his last steps on somewhat solid ground, he knew that she’d be waiting for him, lingering just inside the front door of that other house, the one they’d first called home and then later named their private battlefield. She’d want quick to trap him between her sweaty body and the nearest foyer wall, and then to pursue the next chapter of their vile and well-honed argument. “I hate you,” she’d tell him once again. “I feel as if I’m living with a madman.”

And had he gone to that house on that last evening after work, and not to this secret house of shadows, he now understood that he would have remained still and stiff in front of her, silent and fuming, guilt-ridden and sad, angry for all the failure in his character. “Hopeful dreams begin to die whenever two people fall in love,” he told himself.

On that last afternoon of his former life, after another exhausting day of teaching several university classes, and then spending a few hours inside his office advising students as to which courses might best lead them closer to their stated goals, Jon Trainer walked away from the administration building and toward the nearest parking lot. The surrounding air was dark and full of wind. Raindrops, thin and sharp, cut across his face. As he thought of her, and of their endless quarrel, he felt his legs begin to shiver. His eyes lost focus. His body floated at a dizzying angle above the earth.

He narrowed his line of vision until he located his Volvo wagon, and then he pushed himself forward with intense effort, punched the green button on the remote control that unlocked the car’s doors, yanked backward on the door handle, and fell into the driver’s seat. He listened to the solid, almost silent thud as he pulled the Volvo’s door closed. He leaned back against the cushioned headrest, closed his eyes and considered driving to the tavern in the next town over.

But lately colleagues and self-declared friends had noticed and had chosen to tell him that his eyes looked yellow and his skin looked pale. One woman, a professor of history, just a few days before this grey afternoon, had expressed her concern. In private she’d assured him, although he had understood that if she were commenting on his physical and emotional state, then so too were other faculty members.

“Have you seen a physician about possible liver problems?” she asked. He mumbled an ineffective reply, but next rushed to the restroom, stared at himself in the mirror, and saw that she was right. “Dear God, it’s time to go,” he’d said to himself. “It’s well past time to retreat and to prepare.”

So instead of traveling to the bar, he headed away from the place the two of them still insisted on calling home, steered the Volvo northward onto the freeway, toward the town of Maplewood, where Rosie’s Diner each evening held blue-collar court.

Rosie wore bright-red lipstick in a messy smear across her lips, smelled of five-and-dime rose sachet, snapped chewing gum when she spoke, and covered a customer’s hand with her own when she served the first cup of coffee.

“So, professor, to what do we owe this honor?” she whispered as he took a bench seat at the counter, not far from the diner’s front door. Rosie’s breath was spiced with the odor of cigarette smoke. The diner’s door, disconnected from its broken pump, allowed puffs of air mixed with raindrops to enter and land on the heavy rubber welcome mat. Trainer watched as muddy footprints melted on the rubber, and he wondered which ones might have been his.

“I need a cup of –“

But Rosie had the cup set there in front of him before he completed his request.

“Looks like you need a whole lot more, Jon. But we’ll let that go for now. Dinner, or just a slice of virtue this time round?”

Virtue, Trainer had learned by way of his recent, frequent visits here, was diner-speak for cherry pie. He checked himself and discovered once again that he owned no appetite, but he ordered the slice of virtue anyway, maybe just because he wanted an excuse to stay here for a while longer.

He realized that on a rainy afternoon turning fast toward evening he must look counterfeit and silly with a pair of dark glasses wrapped around his face, but to take them off, he feared, would reveal his disease to other people seated nearby. He wasn’t sure why he cared enough to hide the obvious; the citizens of Maplewood remained gratefully unaware of the employees of Rutherford University, and in any event, Jon Trainer’s life would soon be of little consequence to anyone but the authorities. Still, he supposed that somewhere inside himself he yet harbored a residual sense of pride.

At first he thought that the now familiar, daily sense of vertigo was what threw him off balance, but soon the shock of metal slamming hard against itself cracked the air like a shot from a gun. Trainer reflexively ducked in time to avoid the larger shards of glass as the windowpane closest to the door she had snapped full backward on its hinges gave way. Next he sensed the heat of her, heard the intrusive shriek of her anger and felt the spray of spit hit the back of his neck.

“I hate you, Jon fucking Trainer, and now everyone in this lousy excuse for a town will know what you are.”

He sat up and stared after her as she turned on her heels and left the way she’d come. He felt hot tears leaking from his tired eyes; and through the blurred confusion he surrendered his body to trembling, as Rosie curled her arm around his back and kissed his cheek.