With technology in the shape it is now, it is more difficult for certain wives to get hold of the money. Ben pays all the bills through a system devoured recently by the Vic’s ever-widening maw. Some money drifts into her account when she asks him, but the real money is (of course) imaginary and electronic, impossible to grasp because it’s intangible, implausible to steal because it’s just a wisp of a bookmark tucked into a screen. Even when she knows the code—her birthday, always—it’s not discernible how typing it into the rectangle can get bills into her hand.

So she’s emptied her old forgotten personal account and then, casually and stealthily, she pawned things, things she owned, at an actual pawnshop, the sort of underworld she thought she’d only see in movies about people’s journeys to this sort of underworld. Everyone was polite, Chinese men and a few Russians, off in the Richmond near bakeries with dusty tiered cakes and narrow ramen restaurants with white ceramic cats, some good luck charm or ghost-warding talisman, waving at her in the windows. What she hocked were wedding gifts mostly, extravagances still boxed, flourishes from a bygone or dreamed-up era of lavish entertaining, showpiece vases and decanters like the necks of drained swans. Marriage used to be about money; nowadays, Rachel thinks, zipping up her hooded garment, what is it? Something else, and she sets out.

It’s Sunday night, midnight, deserted everything. She walks with a paper bag full of money, the stupidest girl, isn’t she, in the history of the world. Not even her older phone on her, in case Ben wakes, in case he tries to call. In minutes she’ll be another mugging story told in bars, Can you believe this moron? carved on her tombstone. She shouldn’t be here, no. People who say they’ve tried everything have tried at most four or five things. People who have looked all over the world for their one true love have likely spent just a few years dating in one metropolitan area. She’s not desperate by the terms of desperate. She can raise ten thousand or so dollars, for instance, and she basically loves a man very successful in his wide-open field. It has been a thrill to cheat, to fall for a man who will likely cheat her out of a sackful of money tonight. Maybe this, and she remembers thinking the same thing, entering doubtfully the same forest some years earlier in the passenger seat of her mother’s car, right behind the shaky Mexican catering van, will make her happy.