The counselor offered Aven a dining table in place of money. It was an ugly table, too large for the apartment, and one leg had been repaired with a metal brace. Aven wondered how two people who charged so much for relationship advice could be so bad at lying together.
The counselor's wife stood in the doorway. Her name was Posy. The letters in Aven's bag had been written to her by a man whose spelling improved as the affair continued. At first Aven had thought that touching. He had stopped reading for pleasure once he calculated what they might be worth.
"You own this place," he said.
"We owned it," the counselor replied.
Downstairs, a van sounded its horn. Posy went to the window and held up two fingers. Two minutes. The counselor rubbed his forehead as though the horn had been directed into it.
"I told you to come yesterday," he said.
"I had another appointment."
Aven had spent yesterday waiting for his courage to return. Taking the letters from an open desk during a cleaning shift had been easy. Bringing them back with a price required a different kind of composure, which he had rehearsed while walking around the station.
He placed three on the table. The counselor reached for them, and Aven moved his bag over the pages.
"Twelve thousand."
Posy laughed. It was a short, painful sound.
"If you can find twelve thousand in here, we'll help you carry it."
Aven looked at the photographs along the hallway. The couple on television. The couple on a book cover. The couple in white chairs facing a room full of people who had paid to learn how to stay together. Surely there was money behind some part of that.
"Your clients might want to read these."
The counselor glanced at his wife. She had already turned away and was unscrewing the frame of a bed visible through the open bedroom door. She braced the bolt with a spoon because she could not find a spanner.
"You don't know anything about our clients," he said.
"I know what they buy."
Aven took out the oldest letter. He had selected the sentence on the bus, one intimate enough to stop any further discussion of tables. He began to read.
Posy stopped working on the bed. Her husband pulled out a chair.
"Carry on," he said.
Aven watched him sit. The invitation disturbed the rhythm he had prepared. He read another sentence, then another. The lover had described a hotel room where the windows would not open and a walk taken in wet clothes because neither of them wanted to go home.
"Where was this?" the counselor asked.
Posy said nothing.
"The year, then."
Aven checked the date. The counselor closed his eyes briefly.
"That was the launch. You said you'd gone to see your sister."
"I did see her."
"Afterward?"
She returned to the bed frame. The spoon slipped, scraping her knuckle. Her husband started to rise, then sat again.
Aven put the letter down. Neither looked at him. He had brought a thing they were supposed to pay him to prevent, and it was happening for nothing. He tried a lower price.
"Six. Today. I won't keep copies."
"Did you make copies?" Posy asked.
"Of course."
He had not. The lie came out more smoothly than the truth he had practiced.
The counselor asked to see the second letter. Aven refused. The man shrugged and took off his watch, setting it on the table beside the letter he had already heard. It had a cracked face and a cheap replacement strap.
"Take the watch. I want to know whether she meant to leave."
Posy stood in the bedroom doorway, holding the bent spoon.
"I did."
For the first time the apartment was quiet enough to hear a bird trapped somewhere in the ventilation shaft. It had been fluttering since Aven arrived. He had assumed someone was handling paper in another room.
The counselor gathered his coat from the floor. He asked Posy where she was going. She said she had a room. He asked whether the other man would be there. She shook her head.
He went downstairs without his watch. Aven heard him speak to the movers, then the scrape of furniture being lifted.
Posy sat at the table and held out her hand. Aven gave her the letters. He kept one back until she looked at it, then surrendered that too. She folded each along its existing creases, smoothing the edges with her scraped thumb.
"The desk might sell," she said. "You can have it."
She gave him its small brass key. In the drawer he had once cleaned around lay a separation agreement, unsigned, dated before the last letter. He looked toward Posy. She was packing the letters into her suitcase, making a space between shoes for the version of herself she had sent someone else.
The movers wanted to know which van should take the desk. Aven said he would arrange collection. He waited until everyone else had gone, sitting on the floor because the ugly table and its chairs were already downstairs.
