You were in the kitchen and there was fog outside. We could hear the wind even over the running water, the wind whipping the branches of trees, the one branch that'd whip out of the milk white and slap at the window and disappear again. I saw you startle each time, saw your hands shake. The glass that slipped and broke. It was the glass we bought that summer in France near the ocean, the tall glass with seashells on it. Bought it at that roadside stand we'd biked to from our hotel where earlier we'd made the little one. We knew it even then, the way you slid your hips under mine, tilted.

We kept the glass as a souvenir, reminded us both of the morning and also of the girl, the teenager who ran the stand with her mother, her flowing skirt, her sand-streaked hair, her leaning back into her mother, the smile of her mother. What we wanted our girl to be.

Later, there was the gray wrinkled man we met on the train who spent the whole trip through the Alps talking about his own daughter, about how she'd grown up slower than others say, how even then she needed him, how he had to believe she needed him. He talked slowly with long pauses between thoughts. You held your headphones at your neck, kept waiting for him to finish, until in one mountain pass, he said something about your hands, how soft they looked, how much they reminded him of his daughter's hands and, also, his own hands as a child. Like we're all trees in the same forest, he said.

And then now with your hand bleeding, you turned back toward her, told her she'd done it wrong, shouldn't have been out there in the first place, should've stayed in the house like we asked. Like she deserved it. That she would flirt with a stranger and get caught in a bad place. She was bleeding too. You from the glass, she from the bad place, the two of you standing in drip-fed estuaries of your own blood. You didn't see it, but they flowed together, lazy thin rivers that pooled in the middle of the kitchen tile, the pine-patterned linoleum we bought soon after she was born, like a forest's red lake. I could hear the wind even over your crying. I had to take her out of there.

In the car, I told her you hadn't meant it. That you were sorry. That you loved her. And that's when she started bleeding more and I drove faster. It was hard to see in the fog with the wind and the branches coming out of nowhere. The whole world just car and branches and blood.

Called you from the hospital. You were still upset, still in tears, torn. And it cut into me then. That there wasn't anything left of us. That we'd fallen apart. Neither of us could speak. Just stayed there together with phones in our hands. Our hands soft from the water and everything else.