‘Ask her about it.’

‘I can’t. For Chrissake, I don’t feel easy asking her if she takes sugar in her coffee. How can I ask if she’s having an affair? Because that’s what it must be. It can’t be John.’

‘Why not? Why can’t it be John?’

‘Because I know what it’s like to be deceived and he’s got the look of someone who’s being deceived. I look at him and I see the expression I wore for years. If it was John who was running around, he’d at least look guilty, or maybe I’d have surprised him looking happy and he doesn’t. Anyway, he’s not capable of doing that, of cheating on her. You know him as well as I do. His life runs on rails, that’s what he wants. He’s incapable of sleeping with someone else. Sometimes I think he feels he’s still being punished and he still doesn’t know what for. And, come to that, neither do I.’

‘Well, what can you do? If you can’t speak to her, what can you do? Joan, John’s forty years old. Shit happens. You can’t see your children through everything. Let him go. I’ve spent my life telling you to let him go. John’s one of the biggest men I’ve ever met, in so many ways. Let him go. You can’t anticipate everything.’

And this is where Ellen and I stall, because she lost her husband after four years of marriage and her unborn child at the same time. Strangely, even though I didn’t know Ellen then, I can picture her in her pale yellow clapboard Connecticut home, the pillared gallery running three-quarters of the way round the house, Christmas lights flashing at long mock-Georgian sash windows. I imagine her younger, more hopeful self waiting by the door for her husband to reappear after a day of blue-fishing out of Atlantic City; imagine Ellen dipping back into the kitchen to stir and baste, then reappearing on the gallery to watch the dark road, waiting for the sweep of headlights. Maybe she wore an apron. Maybe she wore a sou’wester and oilskins. I don’t know and she’s never told me. But I do know from the few evenings when she got personal that she spent the late afternoon and early evening wrapping Christmas presents for Matt, her husband. She sat awkwardly on the carpet of the newly decorated nursery, pregnancy making her clumsy, cutting and sealing paper, tying ribbons, trying not to look at the clock. Later she lit the dozen tiny gold candles on the green and red wooden candelabra on the window sill and she sat silently in their pale light waiting for him.

Eventually she heard a car slithering on the icy roads nearby and heaved herself to her feet to go down the stairs. She waited by the door as the evening slipped swiftly past and turned to night. Headlights appeared at last, bucking on the long, private drive. Concern died in her, distilled to anger at the lateness of the hour, but then she noticed the dead blue lights on the roof of the car, the blackness and whiteness of it. The unfamiliarity of it. The car stopped on the gravel in front of the door, stopped gently, not spitting stones. Two officers climbed out and she knew from the heaviness of their bodies, by the mud-heavy way they tucked their caps under their arms, not looking at her, she knew why they were looking at the trees, at the lake, at their boots, looking at anything but her.