Nina turned off the television to hear her husband better. Davor was supposedly calling from a hotel in Lisbon, where he was leading a business workshop. He said dinner with clients began in an hour. In the background she heard something resembling a tram announcement. Nina asked whether it was raining. He said it was sunny, although darkness already filled the window behind her.
What confused her was not the weather but his saying it was equally late where he was. Davor often got time zones wrong. She messaged him that Lisbon was an hour behind. He answered with an emoji and changed the subject. Nina put dinner in the refrigerator and resumed studying Italian, a course she had started after their children left for university.
The next day their professional association posted an invitation to a public lecture at the local Konac center. Davor's coat appeared in a photograph of the stage preparations. Nina recognized the patch she had sewn on its sleeve. It could have been an old photograph. She called the organizer, whom she knew from earlier projects, and asked when the lecture began. He said Davor was checking the projector at that very moment.
She went after work. She did not enter the hall. She waited by the cloakroom, where he stood beside a woman adjusting his collar. When he saw Nina, he stopped in the middle of a sentence. The woman stepped back but did not seem surprised by her name. She knew about the marriage. That shortened a conversation Nina might otherwise have tried to make polite.
At home Davor admitted he had not traveled for three months. He had been staying in another apartment, telling both women he intended to make a decision soon. Nina asked which decision he could make on her behalf. He had no answer. Then he said he had wanted to wait until her course ended, as though an Italian verb test were a smaller obligation than the collapse of a marriage.
The following week Nina slept at her sister's, not because she had surrendered the apartment but because she needed a night without explanations. Later they agreed on temporary living arrangements and separate expenses. They told their children together, leaving out details that would turn them into witnesses. Davor tried several times to speak about loneliness. Nina accepted that he had been lonely but refused to let that become her fault.
At the course's closing dinner, the teacher asked where they wanted to travel first. Nina said she wanted to go to a city whose name she had not yet chosen. Everyone laughed, assuming she was joking. Afterward she bought a travel notebook and wrote the date on the first page. Beneath it she left an empty space for the destination, ready this time to choose both the place and the time of departure herself.