Her shoes were in her hand before she remembered she didn't want to go.
She set them down on the rug — quietly, because he was still half-asleep — and stood there in the gray morning light, watching the slow rise and fall of his shoulder.
The room smelled like him. She hadn't noticed that last night.
She found his shirt on the chair and pulled it over her head without deciding to. It was soft in the way things get after a hundred washings, the collar stretched, the hem nearly to her thighs. She crossed to the window and looked out at the alley, the fire escape, a pigeon standing on the railing like it was making a point.
She heard him move.
"You're leaving."
It wasn't a question. Or it was, but he was trying to make it not one.
She turned. He was watching her from the bed, one arm across his eyes, the other open at his side like an invitation he wasn't sure he was allowed to extend.
"I'm not," she said.
She wasn't sure when that had become true.
He dropped his arm and looked at her fully then — the shirt, the bare feet, the window light behind her — and something in his face went loose.
"Okay," he said.
That was all. She came back to the bed and lay down without taking the shirt off, and he turned toward her, and the morning continued in that long, particular way mornings do when no one is watching the clock.
Later, she would try to say when she had decided. She never could. The shoes were already on the rug. Maybe the deciding had happened somewhere in the night, in the dark, long before she ever picked them up.