They were going through what they had privately acknowledged to friends and family as a rough patch. They had been together for four years, married for two, living in the apartment for one, and driving each other crazy for eight straight months.

How liberating it had been to have a partner willing at the drop of a hat to rise to the challenge of being egregiously, unapologetically, absurdly wrong, and still press the point. The sheer intensity of their fights testified to their uncommon compatibility as a couple. Surely such acrimony would have been impossible without a deep and abiding intimacy goading it on.

[...] Apart from the blank and unsullied aspect lent by its newness, the apartment was mediocre in every way. The appliances were shiny but midgrade, the floors were of a synthetic wood-like substance rather than real wood, the windows creaked, the sinks were raised basins that spilled water everywhere, and really the whole place seemed to suggest that the slightest disturbance, seismic or meteorological or familial, might reduce it to rubble.