Ben listened, then nodded. He'd known there would have been a fight, after that article, so on one level this wasn't news. The question, really, was how big of a fight. Ben was well versed in the varying degrees of marital spats, by now. Some were the sort of thing you could recover from in a few minutes or a few hours; some took days. Some passed on their own, once the initial anger had burnt out. Some took concentrated efforts and apologies to mend. Some just stayed, festering like open wounds, and maybe eventually they killed you — he hadn't gotten to that part yet, so he didn't know, but he felt like maybe this marriage to Melody could kill him, sooner or later.

Art hadn't really specified, but the fact that he'd said it at all, and that he'd said it in response to Ben talking about how he was going through stuff, meant that the fight had to be a big one. It had to be a significant part of the stuff Art was going through. Not that that was necessarily news, either, because Ben had kind of known that as soon as Art walked in. He wouldn't have looked the way he did if he'd had Desdemona in the thick of things with him.

"That's why you weren't home this week," Ben said, more a statement than a question.