A fictionalized marital farce.
Mike and Sally were bored with their evenings. Neither said this especially well. Instead, each privately decided that the missing excitement might be available through an anonymous dating profile.
Mike chose a name suggesting confidence and adventure. Sally chose one suggesting a woman who had never once spent Friday debating which streaming subscription to cancel. Their photographs were discreet. Their descriptions were selective. Their flirtation, when they found each other online, was unexpectedly good.
They agreed to meet at a small Italian restaurant.
Sally arrived first. Mike recognized her across the room and briefly considered whether there was a plausible reason for carrying a single rose into a business dinner.
“You?” she said.
“Apparently,” he replied.
They laughed because the coincidence was absurd. Then neither quite knew what to do with the rest of the evening. Being attracted to each other’s invented profiles did not cancel the fact that both had intended to deceive the person at home.
Over dinner, they compared the things they had told their supposed strangers: that they missed being noticed, that they wanted conversation without household logistics, that they could still be funny when somebody expected them to be.
Those were useful discoveries. They were not an automatic repair.
They went home with an awkward conversation unfinished, the profiles to close, and a reason to decide whether they wanted to rebuild trust. The restaurant had supplied neither a miracle nor a punishment. It had merely made continuing to pretend unusually difficult.
Mike kept the rose. Sally suggested putting it in water before they attempted anything more complicated.
