“There’s going to be another dinner,” he said hesitantly. “Two weeks. Ray Johnston. It’s okay to say we’ll go?” He looked at me, wary still, afraid I might make another scene. But he didn’t know it didn’t matter, wouldn’t even have mattered if I hadn’t been leaving. I would have agreed.

“Sure,” I said confidently. “No problem.” He looked relieved.

I didn’t want to spend the evening just with Stephen, not tonight with the strain of so many secrets. I wanted to suggest we go to a movie, anything to be away from conversation, but that would be cowardly. I had to be able to look directly at what I was doing. I would be stern with myself, and be certain. And, too, I think I wished almost to feel some kind of regret, or guilt, or something — anything. I wanted to have every opportunity for that. It was odd to be so cold.

The children were noisy at dinner, and I was grateful. They told Stephen about school, and he listened. After dinner the three of them went into the den to watch the news on television; it was another thing they shared, started early. Stephen wanted them to be interested in what was going on in the world, and they were proud that he thought them grown-up enough to understand. Sometimes, before, I had been afraid that they would understand too much, would see all the death, and that it wouldn’t matter to them after a while. But Stephen talked with them about what they saw, how sad and painful it was, and how he wished we could make it better for other people, and I think they listened to him. He also told them that what they saw wasn’t all there was, that there were kind and good things, too, that were not news. They seemed to know what he meant, and tried, like him, to be good.

I could hear them telling him we would be making cookies after I got the dinner dishes done. Alone in the kitchen, I watched the dishes as I washed them, blue patterned, figures of people and woods, tried to make myself feel sadness that I would not see these figures many more times — testing still — but there was no sadness. There was nothing. A vacuum where the past and the things I had loved, once, had been.