The Terms

Margot Vale is thirty-six, an emergency physician three days a week and a textile conservator two — her “breathing days,” spent in a museum basement undoing a previous restorer’s confident repairs to a seventeenth-century tapestry. She is married to Rich, a doctor everyone admires. Somewhere in the last nine years she has stopped singing in the kitchen, and she could not tell you when.

On a Sunday walk, past a planter of dying pansies, Rich proposes that they open the marriage. He frames it as freedom. He cites the data. Margot takes three weeks to answer and years to understand the question — which was never, she will come to see, a question at all. Rich takes to the arrangement the way he takes to everything: methodically, in volume, keeping count. Margot manages three dates. Then a man in a bookstore café asks what she’s reading, asks her nothing else, and something in her that has stood still for a decade begins to move.

The Terms is a novel of medicine and marriage told at clinical range: two physicians, one agreement, and the slow discovery of what each of them actually signed. Because an open door admits weather from both directions — and Rich Vale has never once, in his careful life, lost anything he could count.