She later realized the truth had been hovering just above and slightly behind them, at the bar, at his friend’s electronic music show, everywhere they went together. Later it solidified into something like a third person, belted into the back seat of her car while they drove together, never speaking but staring blankly ahead of them out of the windshield, like a mute little dwarf with a pale face. Her car was also pale, a faded Lexus nearly three decades old, in a color they no longer manufactured. When they sat in her car together the presence of the passenger in the back seat created what she came to think of as an energetic imbalance. The steering column squeaked when he was in the car with her and only when he was in the car with her, never when she was alone.

She didn’t normally engage in what she called magical thinking, but the steering column was one of the first things that gave her cause. When he entered the car, ducking low under the passenger-side door with its rimless glass window, the wheel let out a low whine. Alone in her Lexus at night she twisted the wheel back and forth, snaking down an empty alleyway in an attempt to reproduce the sound. But she could never reproduce the sound unless he was there and the passenger in the back seat was there with them, and she took it as an omen of the demise of their love.

Try to take more good omens than bad, I told her, because they reproduce themselves everywhere you go. They’re like seeds you scatter, and later they’ll sprout up. But she was constitutionally opposed to a good omen, so she took the bad ones instead. And there was nothing anyone could do about that, in her best interest or otherwise. She had been this way her whole life.