"I didn't need to hear that."

Ethan's shoulders sloped, his thumbs applying a delicate pressure along the edges of the photograph. The crystal decanter sat on the table. Alisa had stopped pouring.

"I didn't need to hear that."

Zack took a deep breath. His nostrils distorted on the hot exhale as he eyed Ethan. Pupils like sunglasses, there was distance in them now. His jaw gently set and unset, set and unset, slowly clicking off like a wound-down metronome against a dull white noise dropcloth.

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"I just can't..." Ethan muttered, "I just don't believe it."

"You had damn well better."

The burgundy had bleached out of the couch, the mohoganey out of the table, the amber out of the carpet. All color was leeching out of the furniture and coalescing into a deep pool just beneath Zack's skin, which rippled and shivered along the waves as hot droplets condensed on the surface.

"You listen to me, Ethan: you can believe it. You can damn well believe it, and you had damn well better."

Alisa had left the room, her fingers stroking the wet grooves of her glass, her eyes tracking the ice cubes as they rolled gently around inside. She did not shudder when Zack spoke.

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"It's only that, well, it's a lot to take in all at once."

Zack slammed his fists on the table, which shuddered in time with Alisa, and rose up to his full height, eclipsing the ceiling, and he spoke in a voice that Ethan had heard only in his imagination.

"YOU WILL TAKE IT IN. YOU WILL BELIEVE IT."

Zack did not glance at the corner of the couch where Alisa had disappeared, but his tone mellowed into a statement of dead-cold factuality:

"We are not going through this again."