I hate being back. I can still feel you on my skin, taste you on my tongue. I don’t usually think of my life as a prison, but I do now, because it keeps me apart from you. Running away to Antigua was sublime, and I don’t think M. realized a thing, but I hate to live this way. I don’t know which is worse—falling asleep without you, or waking up without you. Do you love me just a little?

I love you with all my heart,

A.

When I finished reading the letter, I drove to Annie Baron’s house in Georgetown. I didn’t call first, because I knew she would tell me not to come, and I was too angry to wait for answers. How could she have done it? It seemed such a profound infidelity, not simply to me but to herself. How could an attractive, smart woman in her thirties have had sex with him? A self-important man in his fifties who ate too much and drank too much, whose entire career had been an act of betrayal. How could she?

It was like a hidden pattern in a drawing: we can stare at it for hours and see nothing, but once we finally get it, it’s all we can see—it’s so obvious. I began running the scenes back in my mind. The intimate way Arthur and Annie had talked at Elsbeth Parsons’s dinner. The way she had leaned toward him, laughed when he made a joke, touched him gently. I hadn’t thought to look under the table. Were they touching there, too? And that beautiful tan? Now I knew where it had come from—the “sublime” visit to Antigua. And Annie’s questions to me when I had returned from New York after trying to tell Weiss that Bowman was a spy. She had obviously told him about it later; that was how he knew I was onto him that night at the Athenian Club. She had snitched. And Abelard. Bowman must have told Annie about my confrontation at the senator’s office; that explained why she had been so clever on television.

She had betrayed me in so many big and little ways. I remembered her mocking laughter before we left for China. “You two have a lot in common,” she had said. And the image of her at the airport when I returned from Beijing with Arthur’s body, the way she stood away from Mara and the family, hiding her eyes behind those sunglasses. And at the church during the funeral, those tears streaming down her cheeks. And all those years when I had been away overseas, trying to become a foreign correspondent like Arthur Bowman. No wonder she had been so coy during my apprenticeship. She already had the real thing.