I Married Him for One Year.

The marriage had a beginning that nobody in either family was proud of, and both families agreed, for exactly once in their lives, not to discuss it. Grace needed the visa; Ethan needed to meet the terms of his grandfather's will, which required him to be married by the age of thirty and to remain married for the first year. The two needs were tabled side by side like anything else: a contract, eleven pages long, drawn by two solicitors, witnessed by two others, and signed on a Tuesday in the registry office with no guests and no rings.

Page four covered the separate bedrooms. Page six covered the public appearances — four per quarter, photographed, with no physical contact beyond what the photographers required. Page eight covered the finances, which were to be completely separate, and page nine contained a clause that both of them had laughed at while drafting it: that neither party would develop feelings, and that if either did, the marriage would be terminated at the end of the current month, with the offending party having no claim on the other.

“It's a very reasonable clause,” Ethan had said, signing it. “I'm a very reasonable man.”

The first three months were extremely reasonable. She learned that he could not sleep with the door open, and that he read three newspapers on a Sunday in a fixed order, and that he left his keys in the same dish every night, as if the dish had been part of the contract. He learned that she talked to his cat in Portuguese, and that she sang in the car when she believed nobody in the building could hear, and that she was, in almost every particular, someone he would have married a long time ago if either of them had believed in anything as inefficient as timing.

In month four, he came home at eleven on a Tuesday and found her asleep at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her hair wet, and stood in the doorway for thirty seconds longer than the contract could account for. She woke up and said something about a presentation. He did not answer immediately, and then he made her tea, which was not in the contract either, and they sat at the table for an hour, talking about nothing that was covered by page four through page nine.

In month five, one of the quarterly public appearances went wrong — the photographed dinner at which she was supposed to smile at the board and he was supposed to be seen being pleased with her — and it went wrong because he laughed at something she said, genuinely, in front of the photographer, and the photograph that ran in the financial pages was of two people laughing, and his grandmother telephoned to ask, for the first time, what the young woman he had married was actually like.

They did not discuss month five. That was the pattern, and it was their own fault, both of them, in exactly equal measure: they had built the marriage out of clauses, and nobody had written the clause for what happens when the clauses stop being the point.

By month nine, the truth was doing its patient work under the floorboards. She had started, without noticing, to plan the public appearances around his schedule. He had started to leave them early, which for a man who had never left a room before the last handshake was as clear a confession as he was capable of making. They had stopped using the word contract, and had not started using any other word, and the silence around the missing word had grown so loud that by month eleven it filled the flat.

In the final month, Grace took the terminal decision into her own hands, because the alternative — waiting for the contract to end and finding out, in the registry's cold arithmetic, what the last month had meant to either of them — was too close to a question she was not ready to ask. She had heard the conversation two weeks earlier, on the stairs, when she had come home early and Ethan had been on the phone to his solicitor, and the phrase she had caught had been so clear and so final that she had stood on the landing with her coat still on and repeated it to herself like a sentence to be memorised: “so we end it — yes, cleanly, end of month.”

She had not confronted him. Confronting him would have required either a legal question or a personal one, and she had eleven pages of training for the first and eleven months of silence for the second. So she did what the contract trained her to do, with the one amendment nobody had thought to write in: she signed the termination papers herself, at the kitchen table, on a Saturday morning, with the ink from the pen he had given her for the first public appearance.

She left the papers on the table — the pages she had just signed, neatly stacked, weighted with the salt cellar so the window would not move them. And because she was, at the last, the person the first three months of the contract had told him she was, she also left one other thing beside them: a flat, unmarked envelope, which she had spent the whole of that week deciding whether to leave at all.

She was gone before he came home. He found the flat empty by the absence of the keys in the dish.

He found the papers on the table, and the envelope beside them, and he did not understand what he was looking at until he had read the first line of the termination notice, and then he understood a great deal in a very small amount of time, including the fact that the envelope beside the stack was not addressed to him. It was addressed, in her handwriting, to herself.

He stood at the table in the empty flat with the salt cellar in his hand and the envelope unopened, and he did the only thing the contract had never prepared him to do: he thought, in silence, about the difference between ending something cleanly and being ended. The envelope was heavier than the papers. He set it down. He did not open it. He had, for once in his life, the sense to wait until someone who knew the answer could decide whether he deserved one.