The Tuesday morning sunlight in Helena was hitting the linoleum in Dr. Evans’s exam room with that flat, unforgiving glare that makes every scuff mark look like a personal failure. I was staring at my thumbnail, picking at a loose piece of cuticle, because saying the words out loud to a man who had delivered my cousin’s twins felt about three degrees worse than standing in the town square in my winter coat. Arlo and I had been married for twelve years, and for the last four of them, our marriage had settled into the kind of quiet, polite roommate arrangement where you discuss property taxes over bran flakes and call it a conversation.

I was forty-one, he was forty-three, and the only time he touched me was when he handed me the salt across the island. Dr. Evans leaned back in his squeaky leather stool, tapped his silver pen against his knee, and gave me that slow, grandfatherly look he reserved for women who were trying very hard not to cry over minor domestic decay.

“He just looks at me like I am the refrigerator, Doc,” I said, my voice sounding way too loud in the little room. “We sit on the couch in the evenings and he reads the tractor auction circulars until his eyes close. If I try to hold his hand during a movie, he finds an excuse to get up and check the oil in the pickup. It is not like there is another woman. I know there isn’t. He is just gone somewhere inside himself, and I do not know how to drag him back.”

Dr. Evans crossed his ankles and sighed, a long, dry sound that smelled faintly of mint lozenges and old carpet. “Well, Martha, men at forty-three sometimes hit a wall where they feel like the engine is sputtering out. Their pride takes a beating over things they will never talk about. Have you tried talking to him about romance?”

I snorted right there, and I didn’t even care how unladylike it sounded. “Talk to him? Arlo thinks romance is remembering to put the recycling bin out on Monday night instead of Tuesday morning. If I brought up our lack of a love life, he would turn three shades of red and go out to the barn to fix a fence that doesn’t need fixing.”

“Has he had his testosterone checked?” the doctor asked, reaching for a little yellow prescription pad that sat next to a plastic jar of tongue depressors.

“Not a chance,” I said, shaking my head so hard my earrings clicked. “Arlo won’t even take an aspirin when he has a migraine that turns his temples gray.

He thinks anything in a bottle is a personal insult to his constitution. He swears fresh air and hard work cured his grandfather of everything from pneumonia to a broken collarbone, and he thinks he is made of the same stubborn granite.”

Dr. Evans smiled, a slow, crinkly-eyed thing that didn’t reach his mouth quite right until he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a small, foil-wrapped square that looked like a foil mint from a roadside diner. He tossed it across the Formica desk with a flick of his wrist. It landed with a soft, dull slap right next to my purse strap. I looked down at it, then up at him, my eyebrows drawing together until my forehead felt like a washboard.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A little insurance policy,” Dr. Evans said, his voice dropping into that confidential register doctors use when they are about to suggest something their malpractice insurance carrier would advise against. “He won’t take a pill if you hand it to him in a blister pack.

But he drinks three cups of dark roast every single morning without fail. No problem. Just crush a Viagra tablet, mix it into his coffee, and he won’t taste a thing.”

I stared at that little square of foil as if it were a live copperhead coiled up on the desk. My fingers twitched, and for a second I thought about sweeping it into the trash can by my feet and telling the doctor he was out of his mind. But then I thought about the silent drives home from the grocery store. I thought about the way Arlo’s shoulders looked under his flannel shirt, heavy and rounded like he was carrying a bag of wet feed he couldn’t put down. I reached out, pinched the foil between my thumb and index finger, and slid it down into the dark, bottomless lining of my leather handbag.

“If this kills him, I am sending the bill to your office,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, though my voice cracked on the last word.

“It won’t kill him, Martha,” Dr. Evans chuckled, already turning his attention back to his desktop computer. “It will just remind him he is still breathing.”

For six days, that little foil square sat at the bottom of my purse like a hot coal. Every time I reached for my car keys or my tube of cherry ChapStick, my knuckles brushed against it, and my stomach did a slow, uneasy roll. I watched Arlo at the breakfast table every morning, stirring his black coffee with the same chipped enamel spoon he had used since we bought the place. He would sit there in his gray thermal undershirt, reading the livestock reports with grease-stained thumbs, completely oblivious to the fact that his entire hormonal destiny was sitting right there in my coat pocket. I told myself I wasn’t going to do it. I told myself it was dishonest, crazy, and the kind of thing they put in low-budget movies that ended in disaster. But then Saturday morning rolled around, and the sky over the valley was the color of dirty zinc, and the silence in our kitchen was so heavy I could hear the refrigerator compressor clicking on and off like a metronome marking out the seconds of our slow decay.

We drove into town in the old Dodge because Arlo needed a replacement shear bolt for the bush hog down at the implement dealer. The wind was kicking up off the mountains, rattling the rusted-out passenger side mirror until it buzzed against the door frame like an angry hornet. Arlo was rubbing his left temple with two fingers, squinting through the windshield against the pale, watery glare of the ten o’clock sun.

“My head is killing me,” he muttered, keeping his eyes fixed on the asphalt as we bounced over the railroad tracks by the grain elevator. “Must be that pressure drop coming off the divide. Feels like someone’s driving a ten-penny nail right behind my left eye.”

“You want to stop at the pharmacy and get some ibuprofen?” I asked, watching his profile out of the corner of my eye.

“You know I don’t take that chemical junk,” he snapped, his jaw tightening into a hard knot beneath his stubble. “Just need some coffee. Caffeine clears out the pipes better than any pill the government ever stamped a number on.”

There it was. The exact stubborn streak that had made me slide that little foil square into the side pocket of my leather tote before we left the house. We parked the Dodge three spots down from the glass doors of the Starbucks on Main Street, a place Arlo called the fancy goat-milk station and only entered under severe protest whenever the hardware store coffee machine was broken down. The place was packed with women in pastel fleece pullovers and high school kids in hoodies leaning over laptops that cost more than my first used Ford. The smell of roasted espresso beans hit you in the face the second you walked through the door, thick and bitter and smelling faintly of scorched caramel.

We found a high, wobbly bistro table right by the front window, wedged between a fake fern in a plastic pot and a stack of local real estate flyers. Arlo dropped his keys on the small round wood-grain laminate top with a sharp clatter that made a woman in a puffy vest three feet away jump half out of her seat.

“I will go get the dark roast,” I said, my voice sounding tight and thin in my own ears. “You sit right here and save the table. Don’t let those teenagers steal our chairs.”

“Make sure it is black,” he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his forehead against the cool surface of his palm. “No sugar. No white poison.”

I stood in the line behind a man wearing a down vest inside the heated building, my fingers sweating against the strap of my purse. My heart was beating so hard against my ribs I was half-convinced the girl behind the cash register was going to hear it over the hiss of the milk frother. I pulled the foil square out of my bag, tucked it deep into the palm of my right hand, and waited for my turn with the kind of cold, hollow dread that usually comes right before you have to tell your insurance company the hay barn has caught fire. When the girl asked what I wanted, I ordered two large dark roasts and a lemon scone I had no intention of eating.

I carried the two heavy cardboard cups over to the small condiment bar by the milk carafes, my hands shaking so badly I sloshed a dark ring of coffee over the cardboard sleeve of Arlo’s cup. I dropped the wooden stir stick, picked it up, and then, with a quick, guilty glance over my shoulder to make sure nobody was watching me like I was mixing rat poison into a public well, I ripped the corner of the foil square. The little white tablet fell out into my palm like a communion wafer. I dropped it straight into the steaming black coffee, took the wooden stick, and stirred until the little white chalky ring vanished entirely into the dark, oily surface.

“Here you go,” I said, sliding the cup across the table toward him as I sat down. My knees were knocking together under the small wooden apron of the table. “Drink it while it is hot. Maybe it’ll knock that headache loose before you go looking at tractor parts.”

Arlo grunted, reached out with his big, calloused hand, the hand that had pulled calves out of frozen mud and swung a ten-pound sledge until his palms were covered in yellow blisters, and lifted the cardboard cup to his lips. He took one long, slow swallow, his throat moving as the dark liquid went down.

For about three seconds, absolutely nothing happened. The espresso machine behind the counter shrieked as someone ordered a double macchiato. A kid dropped a ceramic mug near the pastry case, and it shattered with a sharp, ceramic crack that made half the room flinch. Arlo set the cup back down on the laminate table. His eyes, which had been small and slitted against his migraine just a second before, suddenly popped wide open until I could see the pale blue rings around the dark centers like two holes poked in a frozen pond. His whole body stiffened up so fast the wooden chair gave a sharp, protesting groan against the floorboards.

Before I could even draw a breath to ask him if he was choking, Arlo reached out with both hands and swept the two coffee cups, the wooden stir sticks, the real estate flyers, and the plastic sugar caddy off the table in one violent, sweeping arc. They hit the tile floor with an explosion of brown liquid, wet cardboard, and white sugar packets that scattered all the way over to the pastry case.

“Arlo!” I gasped, half-rising from my stool.

He didn’t even look down at the mess. His face went dark and flushed right up to the roots of his graying hair, his chest heaving under his flannel shirt like he had just run uphill behind a bolting steer. Before I could process what his hands were doing, he grabbed me by the waist with a grip like a pair of iron tongs, hoisted me right off my feet as if I weighed forty pounds instead of a solid hundred and forty, and slammed me down backward onto the top of the small bistro table. The wood groaned and cracked under my spine, but the sound was completely swallowed by the collective gasp of every single person standing within fifteen feet of our corner.

“What in God’s name, ” I started to say, but he didn’t give me the chance to finish the sentence.

He hauled himself up onto the bench right between my knees, his hands tearing at the buttons of my denim shirt with a desperate, clumsy fury that sent two pearl snaps flying across the linoleum to ping off the base of the fake fern. The air went completely out of my lungs, not from fear, but from the sheer, staggering shock of feeling that kind of raw, reckless heat radiating off a man who hadn’t looked at me with anything warmer than mild annoyance since the winter we put the new roof on the machine shed. His mouth came down on mine hard, tasting of dark roast coffee and cedar smoke, and every single year of frozen silence between us just melted away in a single hot rush of breath and skin.

The rest of the coffee shop went dead silent. You could hear the milk frother stop hissing. You could hear the low, steady hum of the pastry case refrigerator in the corner. Someone dropped a magazine. And then, right in front of twenty-four people holding half-eaten scones and almond milk lattes, my husband of twelve years, the man who wouldn’t take an aspirin for a bone-deep migraine, lifted me up against the front window of the Helena Starbucks and kissed me with enough fire to melt the snow off the roof.

“Hey! Hey, you two! Stop right there!”

The voice came from behind the counter, sharp and high-pitched like a small dog barking at a delivery truck. It was the manager, a young man with a neat little goatee and a green apron that looked like it had never seen a drop of actual grease in its life. He came around the end of the pastry case at a fast trot, his eyes wide behind wire-rimmed glasses, pointing a trembling finger right at Arlo’s broad back.

Arlo didn’t even turn around. He just pulled back an inch, his chest heaving, his eyes wild and dark, and glared over his shoulder at the manager with a look so fierce the poor boy actually took half a step backward toward the exit.

“Get out!” the manager shouted, his voice cracking slightly on the high note as half the customers in the shop pulled out their cell phones. “I am calling the sheriff right now! You cannot do that on the furniture! This is a family establishment!”

“We’re leaving,” I panted, my face burning so hot I could feel the heat radiating off my cheeks all the way down to my collarbones, though my arms were locked tight around Arlo’s neck and I didn’t have the slightest intention of letting him go just yet. “We’re leaving right now, just give us a second.”

Arlo set me down on my feet, but he kept one heavy arm wrapped firmly around my waist, anchoring me to his side like he was guarding a prize heifer at the county fair. He didn’t look embarrassed in the slightest. In fact, he had a slow, dangerous grin spreading across his face that I hadn’t seen since we were twenty years old and parking behind the old gravel pit on Saturday nights. The manager marched over, thrust a bright yellow piece of cardstock right into Arlo’s chest, and told us we were banned from the premises for life.

Ten minutes later, we were sitting in the cab of the Dodge out in the gravel parking lot, the engine idling rough while the heater blower squeaked behind the dashboard. My hair was sticking out in three different directions, one side of my denim shirt was missing two buttons, and my face felt like it had been held too close to a wood stove. Arlo was staring straight ahead through the steering wheel, his knuckles white against the black plastic rim, breathing through his nose like a bull that had just busted through a barbed-wire fence.

“Martha,” he said, his voice low and raspy.

“Don’t you start,” I said, reaching into my purse for my compact mirror so I could see just how much damage had been done to my dignity.

“Where’d you get that coffee?” he asked, turning his head to look at me, and for the first time in four years, his eyes looked like they actually saw me sitting there in the passenger seat.

“I didn’t get it anywhere special,” I muttered, my fingers shaking as I flipped open the little plastic lid. “Same place as always.”

“That wasn’t regular coffee,” he said, and there was a dry, crooked little chuckle hiding right at the back of his throat that made me want to hit him and kiss him at the exact same time. “I felt like I could have picked up the front end of this truck with my bare hands and carried it all the way to Great Falls.”

“Well,” I said, pulling my phone out of my tote and scrolling down to Dr. Evans’s direct office number with a thumb that wouldn’t stop twitching. “You are going to have to tell that to someone else.”

I hit the call button, switched the phone to speaker, and dropped it right onto the rubber floor mat between us as it started to ring. It picked up on the second ring with that familiar, dry click of the receptionist’s headset.

“Dr. Evans’s office,” a cheerful voice chimed through the little speaker.

“Get the doctor,” I said, my voice shaking with a mixture of pure mortification and something dangerously close to laughter. “Tell him Martha Miller is on line two and her husband is currently sitting in a pickup truck with his shirt half unbuttoned in the middle of Main Street.”

There was a muffled pause on the other end, the sound of paper shuffling, and then Dr. Evans’s voice came through the small tinny speaker, calm and entirely too amused. “Well, Martha. How did the coffee taste?”

I looked over at Arlo. He was grinning back at me, his face still flushed, looking twenty years younger than he had when we woke up that morning under our gray flannel quilt.

“It worked,” I said, staring right at my husband as I kicked my boots against the rubber floor mat. “Maybe a little too well. But I can tell you right now, we are never allowed back into Starbucks again.”