I had cleaned out my desk in Washington the morning after I was fired. I thought some of my old colleagues might call me, if only to pump me for gossip. But I was instantly an unperson. With the exception of George Dirk, who called regularly, my phone didn’t ring. In the eyes of my colleagues I was a ruined man. In a way, it was a liberating feeling. We all dread making the ultimate mistake, slipping off our spot on the greasy pole and falling into the abyss. But it turned out there was no abyss. There was simply the experience of living inside myself and trying to understand what had happened. I suppose I could have sued someone. That’s what people do, nowadays, when something terrible happens to them. But I couldn’t imagine doing it.

Annie Baron called me the day after I was fired. “I’m proud of you,” she said. She seemed to understand, without my saying a word, that I had lost my job in the same war that had taken Arthur’s life. She offered to come visit, but I wasn’t ready to see her. Several weeks passed and I kept thinking the next day I would call her. But I never did. I had been thinking, since that lovely May day we went out walking, what answer I would give to her question: Could we truly begin all over—marry and have a family and start our life clocks again? But as the days and weeks passed, I knew that starting over in this way was impossible. We are the sum of our choices and decisions, chances and accidents. Our personal history is built up in layers that contain our history as surely as sediments of rock contain the history of our planet. I couldn’t undo my previous life with Annie any more than I could undo what had happened at the Mirror. It was all woven together in one fabric, which was my life.

One evening, out walking along M Street, I saw Annie on the arm of another man. She was glowing. She looked up at him with the spark of love in her eyes. He was a guy in his mid-thirties, handsome enough, sure of himself and his entitlement to happiness in the simple way that people are, until their expectations have been confounded. She didn’t see me, and I let her walk by. I didn’t feel pain so much as finality. She was starting afresh, and so eventually would I.