I.

Marcus had been a data analyst at Brentwood Freight for almost two years before he met Anna, and a little over three before he married her. He was the kind of man who, at a party, would find the one other person who'd read the same long-form article that week and stand with them in the kitchen until everyone else had gone. Anna was the kind of woman who, at the same party, would have charmed the host's grandmother and learned the names of all three dogs.

They met at a friend's birthday in Astoria. Marcus had brought a bottle of wine he'd researched for forty minutes. Anna had brought a card. The card was funnier than the wine.

The first year was easy. They moved into a one-bedroom on a quiet block in Sunnyside with a kitchen too small for two people to cook in at once, which they did anyway, bumping into each other and laughing about it. Anna taught fourth grade. Marcus worked from home three days a week and missed her on the other two. On Saturdays they walked to the farmers' market and Anna bought flowers and Marcus bought, almost always, a single very expensive cheese, and they argued cheerfully about whether this was sustainable.

He had, in those days, what his mother called a steadying effect on people. He was not exciting. He was reliable. He returned texts. He remembered birthdays. He listened — really listened, his whole face going still — when a friend was telling him something hard. Anna had told him once, early on, that the first thing she'd loved about him was the way he'd asked her about her sister, who had died when Anna was nineteen, and how he'd asked the second question, the one most people didn't think to ask, and then waited a long time for the answer.

He was good at his job. He was not brilliant at it. He was good at it the way a competent carpenter is good at building shelves: he showed up, he measured twice, the shelves were level, the shelves held books. The Brentwood dashboards were not beautiful, but they were correct, and on Mondays the operations team trusted them, which Marcus understood — though he never said so out loud — to be a kind of small daily love that flowed from him to people he had never met.

In the second year of the marriage, Anna got pregnant, and then, in the eleventh week, she wasn't anymore. They had not told anyone yet. There was nothing to tell now, which was, Anna said, the worst part — the absence of a thing she had to explain. She cried for three days and then stopped, and Marcus, who did not know what to do, did the dishes for a month without being asked. They did not talk about it much, after. They meant to. They kept not.

Something shifted in him, then, though it took him a long time to see it. He began to want, badly, for things to be correct. Not just at work — at home, too. He wanted the silverware drawer organized. He wanted the bills paid on a schedule. He wanted, when Anna asked him what he was thinking, to have an answer that was precisely the thing he was thinking, not an approximation. Anna, who had always loved how he listened, began to notice that he no longer responded the way he used to. He paused longer. He qualified more. I think — well, partly — it depends what you mean by —

"You're doing it again," she said one night, in the kitchen, over a pot of pasta.

"Doing what."

"That thing where you can't just answer."

"I'm trying to answer accurately."

"I didn't ask for accurate. I asked how your day was."

He looked at her for a long moment. He genuinely did not know how to answer. The day had contained many things. Some had been good. Some had been bad. Most had been neither. To say fine would be untrue. To enumerate would be tedious. He stood there with the wooden spoon in his hand, and the pasta water boiled over, and Anna laughed and pulled the pot off the heat, and the moment passed, but he remembered it later. He remembered it a lot.

II.

The acquisition was announced in March of the third year. Brentwood Freight bought a smaller competitor called Polk Logistics, and Marcus was put on the team that would merge the two data systems.

It should have been a six-week project. It became a six-month project, and then a year-long project, because the two companies, despite being in the same industry and headquartered four miles apart, did not agree on what a customer was. Brentwood's customers were billing entities — rows in a table identified by a unique key, against which invoices were issued, which is the standard sense in industry data modeling. Polk's accounts were operational entities, which meant the same logical company might appear three times in Polk's database, once for each warehouse it shipped to. Marcus spent his days writing reconciliation logic and his nights, increasingly, lying awake thinking about it.

He brought in a consultant. Her name was Dr. Yelena Voss. She had been, before consulting, a philosophy professor at a midwestern university Marcus had heard of but couldn't place. She wore black turtlenecks and...