I see her every morning at the third stoplight.

Canvas tote. Blue cardigan. Hair that falls across one eye. Not beautiful. Not ugly. Just a face that keeps returning.

She bends once to pick up my bus card.

“You’ll need it,” she says. Small voice. Kind. That tiny kindness lodges in my chest like a splinter.

At home, the house is a thing that breathes wrong.

My wife fills the rooms with polite anger. She wants things done. She wants them done right. She wants me to be smaller. She paces the rooms with lists folded in her teeth. I learn to move around her like furniture.

-----

I watch the stoplight. I time my mornings. Shift my life by seconds to meet her in that narrow window of heat and diesel. I memorize the dip of her shoulder. The way she taps the side of her mug when the bus is late. The small tilt of her head, like someone listening for something only she can hear.

You can call it wanting. You can call it hunger. I call it seeing something that does not ask much of me and gives me everything.

I tell my wife I’m done. She laughs. Tells me I am a coward. Tells me to take the trash out. I walk out with the bag in my hand and don’t go back for it.

-----

I tell the girl—Mira—that I left. She nods like she knew. We have coffee. Her fingers are small and capable. She tells me about postcards and museum hooks and the old man who leaves burnt coins in the donation box. I tell her about the plant on my desk that keeps surviving for eight years because I forget to kill it. She writes that down like it is holy.

We kiss on a bench by the river. Her mouth tastes like orange peel and rain. It doesn’t explode. It steadies. It is enough to get me out of bed in the mornings, enough to make the city seem less like a street I haunt.

We begin it at her place. Not far. An easy walk for us. The sex is less thank spectacular but more than I receive at home. She told me not to wear a condom, insisting that she feel all of me inside her. I oblige and leave her cum filled and sleeping at half past six. It was the only time.

Then the notes start.

You were late today.

A photo of the front of my building, time-stamped.

Yellow mums tied with twine. Card: You’re doing well.

I laugh it off at first. Paper is paper. Cities drop odd things at your feet every day. But the paper piles up. The voice on my voicemail is a breath and a hang-up. Texts arrive from numbers I don’t know: Missed you. I saw you. I like the way you stand.

-----

At Mira's place we lay in bed. I take the last drag of her cigarette. She rolls over and looks at me like a mirror that doesn’t lie. “I noticed you first,” she says. “I timed my mornings to yours before I ever spoke.” She says it plainly, like she is reading a line that was always there. Her hand rests on mine and trembles half with confession and half with pride.

It should comfort me that I’m not the only one who noticed. Instead, it cracks something open. The small safety I’d built in the bus stop—my ritual, my proof—becomes porous. I start checking locks. I look over my shoulder. I replay the mornings, finding a woman at my back in memory I’d never given a name.

These things accelerate in the way bad weather accelerates. Drawings appear: my profile, sharp and certain, eyes a little too knowing. A note left on my mat: I made space for you. It reads like a promise and a threat at once. I go to the police. They give me paper with legal words. Protective order. Temporary. Permanent if you keep it up.

It does not keep her out. The messages grow. Breathing on the line. Footsteps in the stairwell when I know no one is in the building. A shadow at my window at two in the morning like a black hand pressed to glass.

Then the arrest. Handcuffs. The quiet of an interrogation room where faces are flat and official. They find her after she crosses a line I did not see until it was crossed. In court, she looks at me with a kind of sweetness that is almost gentle. She speaks my name low like a hymn. They put her in a car. The door slams like the end of something.

I am supposed to feel clean. I should feel victorious. Instead I feel raw, like a throat scraped with glass. Relief tastes like metal.

-----

At night, in my dreams sometimes it is my wife. Sometimes it is Mira. We slow our steps. I teach myself to live with small things again: a cup that doesn’t tip, a plant that keeps living. She asks me how my head is. She listens. She asks nothing of me I cannot give.

And still the edges aren’t right. Sometimes when I wake, I hear the bus, and the notes are there in the dark where no paper lies. The apartment creaks as if someone is walking through it. I press my face to the window and watch the street as if the street might tell me what is true.

The truth is a pliable thing. You can shape it with guilt, with want, with the soft ease of a story that covers a jagged place in your life. I tell the story often. It keeps my hands from shaking. It keeps the face of the woman I left from becoming a stranger in the next room.

And then there is a morning when the third stoplight is a strip of fluorescent that hangs over a cinderblock wall. No river. No bus. No bench. No Mira. The light buzzes, and the voice that answers me when I speak is thin and practiced and not at all the one I remember.

-----

They lay the story out in pieces. A calendar of my days with red marks. They show me the knuckles on her hands and the calluses I keep forgetting are not mine. The detectives speak slow. A tablet shows a photograph of a kitchen floor, a smear that is darker than a shadow. They do not toss the word around, but the meaning pools heavy in the room. Murder. They ask me where I was that evening. They play the recordings. They show me the texts. They point out the documents I signed. I can see the times line up like teeth.

The world tilts. I spin for a moment and then sit. The bench is hard. My palms are sweating. I have been telling a story to keep warm. That story kept a shape around me. But the shape was fabricated out of loneliness and need. What I called love was an edge carved deep by anger and fright.

Was she obsessed? Maybe. Or maybe I made her so. Maybe in the nights after the fight—after the trash, after the laughter that cut me thin—I tattooed myself into the outline of another life. It is easier to invent a stalker than to admit what a man did to the woman who shared his bed.

-----

They bring me here. White walls. A cot. The air is the scent of bleach and old paper. I move my hands across the metal table until my fingertips are numb. The guards walk past like ordinary things that happen to people you know. There is no bus stop. There is a yard with thin grass. A fence with coils of wire like a crown for ruins.

At first the story is my contraption—one I can turn on to entertain myself. I lay it out in the dayroom and watch men nod because men need each other to keep their heads. They like the stoplight. They like the girl who isn’t perfect. They like the twist where he’s both victim and sinner. They pass cigarettes and ask for more.

Sometimes in the small hours, the edges of the tale bleed. I see my wife in a flash of a white dress, or in the sink with the light over it. I hear the way she said my name the last time we spoke and it is not the same shape as the way I remember. Memory is a bad landlord; it raises the rent on the truth and you pay with what’s left of you.

Some nights I tell the story so often I believe it. Other nights, the belief feels like a costume I have to put on to face the men who nod and murmur. Between the telling and the silence I find a thin relief. The two-dozen versions of the same thing slide over one another like old shirts until one fits without pinching.

A guard brings me a paper cup of coffee and looks at me with something like pity. “You okay, man?” he asks. I nod because I am tired of explaining. I hold the cup and feel the warmth and imagine, briefly, the small kindness of a stranger at a stoplight.

So I tell it again. The stoplight. The bench. Mira with citrus on her mouth. The notes. The photograph. The flowers tied with twine. The way the arrest smelled like ozone and old iron. I tell it because it keeps the house that hurts from returning in full. I tell it because a good story knits a man back into himself, even if the thread is frayed.

Sometimes, in the yard when the sun is honest and the air is sharp, I walk to the fence and press my face against the chain links. Beyond the wire, men in shirts of different colors water the grass, and the world moves. The third stoplight is a line of painted asphalt in my head. I cross it alone.

There is an odd peace in the shape of my new life. Not freedom. Not redemption. A small, stubborn absence of the pretending that used to shape me. I fold the story into a pocket and rub it between my fingers like a coin.

It buys me something: a clarity that is cheap and honest. The things I told myself to survive—about the girl, about being watched, about who did what—sit now side by side with the things I did not want to see. They do not cancel each other out. They make a new kind of truth: a messy, human thing. I can live in that. I can make a bed in it.

Outside, the bells of the city keep starting and stopping. Inside, men play cards and argue about nothing. I tell the story to keep my hands busy. I tell it because it fits in my mouth and because when I say it I feel, for a while, like a man who has made sense of a life.

When the lights change, when I close my eyes, there is still a face that returns. Sometimes it is hers—sharp, alive, laughing. Sometimes it is the girl at the stoplight, eyes steady, small smile closed like a secret. And sometimes it is my wife, who is gone, who taught me how to be small without meaning to.

I cross the street in my head. The third stoplight flickers. I do not know which of the two endings is true. I only know the one I sleep with tonight.