In Paris I am Mara. In Moscow I am Irina, and I have a husband who knows that woman and has never heard the other name said in a bed. I am thirty-two. Dark hair, cut to the jaw so it behaves in airports. Pale in a way two winters stack on top of each other. I have been careful for three years, which is a kind of talent: two phones, two calendars, a lie so well made it started to feel like furniture. Julien found it because I got tired, and tired people leave a boarding pass in a coat.

He held it in his kitchen in the 11th, the one with the bad tile and the good knife. Thirty-five. A mouth I had told, in this city, that I was free. The pass had my other name on it and a date that contradicted a weekend I had spent in his bed.