He’d had an idea in the night, as a result of our conversation. He wouldn’t tell me what it was as he didn’t want to jinx it, but he promised to give me the full story after he got back.

He was in a jittery, distracted state as we drove to the station, talking in non sequitur bursts about his Crime-and-Place project, his daughter’s new partner, Hanan’s visa problems, anything but his “ordeal,” though it was obvious he’d been up all night thinking about it. He’d shaved and splashed on some of the cinnamon-scented cologne he sometimes wore, but a sheen of exhaustion clung to him—a sort of manic optimism shot with dread.

“There’s a quiet car on the train,” I told him. “You should get some sleep.”

“Not a chance.”

I didn’t hear from him for a while. The spring turned mild and showery, with waves of blossom rolling through the woods, and birdsong bubbling everywhere like some naturally ­occurring spritz in the air. But it was melancholy, too: our first with no child at home. I worked on a book, fitfully, breaking off regularly to remember, as if from yesterday, how I used to sit at this same desk, watching our children laughing and squabbling as they played on the swing set that stood unused now out on the empty lawn. The paradox of memory—being able to traverse in an instant the chasm of time that had taken all these years, all these thousands of days, to inch across in the first place—never ceased to fascinate me, and if I was lucky, the fascination would supplant the feeling of sadness. Caitlin, less metaphysically disposed, took it harder—or maybe just took it straight. I’d see her in a doorway, staring at some haunted corner, her eyes moist, a look of bewilderment on her face as if she were trying to recall why she had ever opened herself to this inevitable desolation in the first place. I’d put my arm around her, remind her what happy, functional, unfucked-up kids our parenting, and hers especially, had produced; how they’d always be coming back to us, one way or another . . . Obvious platitudes, but they seemed to comfort her, at least temporarily, and she’d cheer up, or pretend to; she’d go off to the hospice where she volunteered, or repot some plants, or take a stroll with her birding binoculars, or work on a proposal for another travel book in the series we’d started before the kids were born and set aside when they were too old to pull out of school. We were tentative with each other; each of us aware of the need to establish a new basis for our marriage, or reestablish the original basis, if such a thing were possible.