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Jonathan pulled his hair loose from its bun and rolled his head back and forth against the back of the couch. “No, I do not believe that he did.” He stared at the ceiling for a moment, then swung his head to me again. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to ignore him. I think I'm probably going to keep that up for a while.”

“You're gonna have to talk to him eventually.”

“I'm aware of that,” I snapped. “But I will when I'm damn well ready.”

“Care,” Jonathan said slowly, “I just have to ask.” (Though I knew what he was about to ask, and really, he didn't have to.) “It's so out of the blue…Patrick. Did you have
any
idea?”

“You know I didn't.”

“No, I mean…not that he was cheating, that he was…attracted to guys.”

“Should I have? Some secret signal I missed?”

“No. I'm sorry. Just trying to make sense of it.”

“
You
are? Ha.” I stabbed my fork at another meatball with such force that a fragment of meat sailed out of the carton and landed with a soft
whap
noise on Adam's letter. I felt a dizzying tug of curiosity toward the letter, but I clenched my jaw until it subsided. I would not give Adam what he wanted. And besides, if his voicemails were any indication, it was probably just a bunch of beautifully worded but pointless self-flagellation.

“But no,” I said. “I had absolutely no idea. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I still can't even believe I'm having this conversation with you right now. This is somebody else's life. Other people's husbands have sleazy affairs, not…” My words trailed off as I realized how arrogant it sounded.
Not mine.
As if I was better than everybody else…as if my marriage were perfect.

Jonathan squeezed my shoulder. “Listen, you guys are gonna be fine. What he did was horrible, but you know he loves you more than anything. If anyone can pull through this, it's you two. You guys are lifers, everybody knows that.”

For a long time, both of us were silent. Then he sighed.

“Christ, Patrick fucking Rubinowitz. I'm gonna have to deal with that mess at some point.”

“What mess do
you
have?”

He rubbed at his bearded cheek with one palm, making the skin pucker around his eye. “Alicia.”

And all of a sudden, I felt something bubbling inside me like shaken soda, something I'd usually clamped down on before: the need to be honest, when it wasn't explicitly called for. It might not be welcome, but it could do some good; and good was better than silence as far as I was concerned. “Listen, I have to tell you something, because this seems like a good night for truth—that girl, she is godawful.”

Jonathan's wing-shaped eyebrows flew up his forehead, but I barreled onward. “She is, she's terrible. She's hot, and I'm sure she's fun in bed, but she's vapid and boring and shallow.
Please
dump her.”

He laughed, a little uncertainly. “Well, alrighty then. Tell me how you really feel.”

Which was exactly the wrong thing to say to me in my present state of mind. “Honestly? Most of the girls you've dated since Rebecca in college have been
so awful.
Yes, including Mariah.”

“I was with her for two years!”

“Yeah, and I hated her for both of them.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Okaaaaay. I guess it's a truth party in here.”

“It's been driving me insane for ages. You're too old to keep dating hot bimbos. You've got to at least
try
to find a good one.”

He was working up a good head of righteous outrage, I could see it. And I deserved it. But after a few seconds of staring at me while his mind churned for a rebuttal, he abruptly surrendered to laughter, dropping his forehead into his palm.

“God help me, you're fucking right.”

“I know I am.”

He chuckled again. “Okay. In honor of this weird and awful night, I hereby swear”—he did Scout's Honor with his right hand—“that I, Jonathan Brast, will stop dating bimbos. And that I will try to find a good one.”

“Witnessed,” I said somberly, “by me, Caroline Ha—” My throat locked. I couldn't bear to form the word. My name. Adam's name.

“Shit,” I whimpered.

And then Jonathan was holding me, rocking me back and forth as tears spread messily over my cheeks. The ache was eating me alive, and all I wanted to do was sink into the oblivion of sleep so I wouldn't have to feel it anymore. But I knew sleep would only get me through until tomorrow morning. As soon as I opened my eyes, the pain would be there waiting for me.

This was only the beginning.

My heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say something to you not for the world, words fail me.

—Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, June 11, 1852

At 6:06
A.M.
two days later, I was facedown in Jonathan's pillow, denying the existence of alarm clocks and sunlight, when I heard him set a mug down on the tiny night table next to my head.

“Come on, Care. We've gotta get a move on.”

The words bounced slowly around my skull. I pushed up on one elbow and glared at him. “Get a move on where? And why now?”

“I'm driving you back to Williamstown. And then I have to catch the ten
A.M.
bus back to the city so I can be at work by four.”

I sank my head back into the pillow and peered at him through my one exposed eye. “Do I really have to go home?”

His smile was kind, and a little sad. “You do, darlin'. It's been fun having you here, but you're not going to figure things out binge watching
Battlestar Galactica
on my laptop.”

“It's been pretty great to forget I had anything to figure out,” I said.

“I know. But I think you'll feel better once you get home. Drink your tea, honey, and let's get out of here.”

I sat up and drank, studying Jonathan over the edge of the mug. Why the hell, why the
ever-loving hell,
couldn't I have done what every single friend of ours in college had been vocally confident that I would do, and end my long-distance relationship with Adam so I could date Jonathan? Though no one believed me, I'd always been too in love with Adam to suffer any real twinges of attraction to Jonathan; but it hadn't escaped my notice that he was a knockout. Penetrating blue eyes and collarbone-length rusty-red hair that just begged you to run your hands through it. Fair skin so burnished with freckles it went almost golden. A jawline you could crack an egg on, currently adorned by a trim beard that—as fun as it was to tease him for being a hipster—I had to admit really worked for him. And I'd seen him on enough beach trips to know he had a lot to offer in the shirtless department, if you were into that sort of thing (especially if you liked your boys inked). He had taken it as a personal challenge to be the one Southern chef in America who didn't let his pork belly roots get the better of him. And Jonathan would never,
ever
cheat.

Then again, two days ago I would have bet all the blood in my body that Adam wouldn't, either.

Usually, trips back to Massachusetts with Adam were our time to talk over the events of the weekend, molding the forms of the stories we'd collected and then baking them into fixed and hardened shapes that we'd store in our collection forever. That time I let Jonathan persuade me to eat an escargot and it took me four minutes to swallow it; the time Ruby broke the thong on her designer flip-flop and she just tucked it into her purse and walked barefoot instead of going back to her apartment.

But today, it was Jonathan driving while Adam stayed behind in the city. I had his letter tucked into the pocket of my overnight bag, still unread. It lurked there, waiting for me, like a troll under a bridge who didn't know I could see him.

The reason that Jonathan was driving, instead of me driving my own car and Jonathan tagging along for company, was that he had years ago banned me from driving any car in which he was a passenger. “You brake so hard it concusses me, and your lane changes look like you had a muscle spasm,” he'd said.

Asshole. I'd learned to drive in Manhattan, for god's sake. What did he want from me?

He had to stop to piss out his coffee halfway through the drive, and I patted his head when he settled into the driver's seat again. “You look tired,” I said. “Why don't you let me take the wheel?”

“That's cute, Caroline,” he said, and shook the last of a mini pack of walnuts into his mouth. “How are those driving lessons coming? The ones I gave you for your thirtieth birthday?”

“You mean the worst present I've ever received?”

“Yeah, but you're spoiled. Your husband makes other guys look like toddlers whose idea of a gift is a plastic toy they just drooled on.”

A beat after he said it, he flinched. “Shit. Sorry. Didn't mean to bring him up.”

I rested my head against the window and stared out at the rippling hills on the horizon. “It's okay. It's not like I've stopped thinking about it for one second.”

Somehow, we were talking around Adam the way a bereaved person and her friend might skirt the mention of their dead. And it hit me that it
felt
like a loss. He was supposed to have been with me, for every hour of the last day and a half, sitting next to me on this very drive. His absence, his silence—they were jarring and wrong. That I should be so catastrophically hurt by him, and be hurt still further by missing him after his betrayal, felt like a foreign, slimy object lodged in my chest. I wanted to stab it.

Just as Jonathan put the car into reverse, his phone rang. We both stared at it. There was only one person who would call Jonathan this early on a Sunday, and only one reason why. The troll was skulking out from under the bridge.

“What do you want me to do?” said Jonathan. “He's just going to keep calling. I think he's freaking out that you won't answer him.”

“Can you just get rid of him, please?”

Jonathan stretched one eyebrow by way of comment, but he put the car back into park and picked up the phone. “Hi, Adam.”

I couldn't decipher the exact words that poured out of the speaker on Jonathan's phone, but it didn't matter: The burble of sound rang with pure frustration. And panic and worry and strain.

“She's here,” Jonathan said, watching my face for guidance. “I'm taking her back home.” There was a pause, then: “She doesn't want to talk to you. And she doesn't have to if she doesn't feel like it.” After another moment, he turned the phone away from his mouth and spoke to me. “He says he loves you and he wants to apologize, and he says don't you want to hear what he has to say?”

God, I wanted to hear Adam's voice. The need to connect to him was like a penned wild animal, pacing, churning the dirt with its hooves. But the thought of letting that need make me crumble, in the face of a wrong I could barely begin to understand—it terrified me.

“No,” I said, turning my face to the window again. “I do not.”

“Boy, this brings back memories,” said Jonathan an hour and a half later as he leaned, tattooed arms crossed, against the side of my car while we waited in front of Williamstown's one hotel for the bus to New York to arrive. “Sometimes I still can't believe you moved back to our college town.”

Jonathan had been right that coming home would make me feel better. When we'd crested the rise leading into the last stretch toward town, some little part of me had set down its load with a sigh. That view: A broad field spread out before us, its richly carpeted green scattered with bursts of goldenrod, while in the distance, a cranberry-red barn nestled at the base of a swelling ridge of mountains, lavender against the horizon. I'd loved this particular slice of the world for fifteen straight years now, and the road that meandered along that valley, flirting with the Green River that ran along by its side, had been my way home for the past three. I defy anyone to tell me there's not something delightful about an address along a street named Green River Road.

The move to Williamstown had been 97 percent me and only 3 percent Adam, which was an unusual distribution of influence in our relationship, but I'd wanted it badly enough that I think he would have felt like too much of an asshole denying me. And since Adam was able to work from anywhere within driving distance of the city, Williamstown it was. The MASS MoCA job was fantastic, and I'd been ecstatic to get it, but the other thing was, I was just tired of living in New York. I was unique in this, among all the other NYC natives I know; most of us cling to our hectic city like caterpillars on a tree branch. But something in me yearned for someplace open and green, where I wouldn't have to share a wall or ceiling with anybody
or
their plumbing.

“I moved back to our college town,” I said to Jonathan now, “but you're the guy who's planning to open a restaurant within sneezing distance of where he went to culinary school. No way, a CIA chef opening a farm-to-table place in the Hudson Valley? Who woulda thunk?”

“I should pinch you for that, but you're right,” he said, flicking a piece of grass he'd been playing with onto the pavement.

“Ah, I was just teasing. You're going to do fantastic and you know it. Your food is special. And I've never seen you not own the hell out of anything you decided to do.”

He squinted at the horizon. “Defining my viewpoint isn't the hard part. It's consistency that builds your reputation. I'm not going to be able to cook everything that goes out of that kitchen, which means I have to hope to god I can get a crew that's strong enough to trust. It has to be right. This is the first step to everything.”

Most people I know are ahead of the curve if they have their next five years planned out; Jonathan had fifteen already charted. His dreams didn't end with a restaurant in the valley. Long-range, he was after nothing less than his own international-caliber farm hotel like Tennessee's Blackberry Farm, where he'd spent his high school years and college summers learning every facet of the luxury hospitality business. And I do mean every facet: He'd been a dishwasher, busboy, waiter, front desk attendant, prep assistant, line cook. I've always thought it was generous of the Blackberry people to keep training him on a new skill every time he showed up, rather than making him do the thing they'd paid him for the last time. I'm sure they could tell this kid from down the road was going to be a big name someday.

During the lull in conversation, the bus arrived in a puff of exhaust and squeaking brakes.

“All right, darlin', this is me,” said Jonathan, pulling me into a hug. Jonathan's hugs have always felt as good as sunshine: tight but not suffocating, faintly scented of whiskey and ginger.

I locked my arms around his sturdy back and squeezed. “Thank you so much for taking care of me,” I mumbled. “I needed it.”

He kissed the side of my head. “Please. I just hate that something this shitty even happened. I meant what I said, though—you two can work through this. If you want to.”

If you want to.
The words lingered, long after Jonathan's bus had disappeared around the bend on southbound Route 7. They lingered as my car wheels crunched slowly along my gravel driveway, and then as I sat, while my cooling engine pinged, staring at the house I shared with Adam.

Good lord, but I loved that house. Built in 1922, it was quaint but not so old it needed constant maintenance like the slope-roofed Colonial I'd had to be talked out of by a combined team of Adam, Jonathan, and my mother. Massachusetts is the kind of place where the houses have plaques next to their front doors announcing their age, and barns with doors large enough to allow passage of an actual carriage. I'd left the city for America's old country, and I'd wanted my very own piece of history.

Shaded by a noble trio of maples on a meadow within earshot of the Green River, with its magical soundtrack of spring peepers and burbling water, our house had a deep and gracious front porch accented with a crape myrtle at each corner. The rows of multiple-paned windows that marched across most of the first floor meant that the light inside the house changed with the season. This afternoon, it was bright and green-blue with summer. It was Adam's favorite season here. I had no idea if he'd spend the rest of it with me.

If you want to.
It nipped at my heels as I walked upstairs to our bedroom, and hovered over me as I lay there, precisely in the center of the same mattress that Adam and I had bought so joyfully eleven years before. Those words of Jonathan's were the first allusion I had heard, let alone uttered myself, to the fact that I might have a decision to make.

For two days, I had been nothing more than a quivering, pulsing blob of hurt—no sentient thoughts had developed so far, just one unbroken wail of pain. I hadn't even begun to consider where Adam and I might go from here. If you had asked me what I wanted, well, it was for none of this to have happened. For neither of us to have ever laid an eye on brilliant, beautiful Patrick Timothy at all.

Except, no. That wasn't it. I'd have to dive deeper with my wishing, down into the cold dark water where the sun didn't reach. Down to where I didn't even know what I was looking for. So far down, I was afraid to look.

My mind flicked back to the photographs: not just the one that broke everything apart, but the whole series. The way I had, cluelessly, admired the sensuality of them. Before I had realized the passion Patrick had captured had been shared with
my own motherfucking husband.

I kicked the sheets away from my legs and tugged a pillow over my face to muffle my sobs.
Why?
Why, why, why, why, and
how
? A
man
? There was no part of my brain where it even began to make sense. Not one. He had never asked me for a threesome. I had never run across gay porn on his computer. There were no confessions about early teenage explorations, erotic dreams, surprising fantasies…nothing. I had been in an intense, absorbing relationship with this person since we were both sixteen years old, and not once in that time, not
once,
had he behaved like anything other than a man who wanted to have sex with women. And only women. Only me.

And our sex…it was good. Like in any relationship, some times were better than others, and in the more recent years things had slowed down compared to the beginning, but that was natural, wasn't it? Nobody can sustain the level of sexual excitement they feel for their partner in the early phase of the relationship. Not over seventeen years. I had never expected to.