There is a doorway on the second landing of a building in Graça that has been one inch too wide for nine years. I am Teresa. I am thirty-six. I live on the left of that landing, and Rui lives on the right, and the inch between a kiss and a closed door is a distance we have both measured with our faces and then refused.

We were not young when it started. That is the part people get wrong when I try to tell it badly at a dinner and then don't tell it. I was twenty-seven, new to Lisbon, a job at a publisher that paid in books and a view of other people's washing. He was twenty-nine, a carpenter who came home with resin on his hands and…