“Jesus Christ,” Nora said, sounding both shocked and sympathetic for the first time. Zach was almost afraid of the next question.

“You don’t have any children so I’ll assume it was one of three possibilities—adoption, abortion or miscarriage.”

“It was ectopic. Worse than a miscarriage.”

He heard Nora’s slight intake of breath, the wince of pain.

“How bad was it?”

“It almost killed her. She was so young she didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. She ignored the pain for a month. We’d only been married two weeks when she woke up in a pool of blood. One in a million chance, the doctor said, that a girl so young and healthy would suffer that. So young, he said, and he looked at me like a criminal. I felt like one. Eighteen years old and she’s hemorrhaging in the emergency ward. Eighteen years old and she has to marry a man over a decade her senior, a man hardly more than a stranger to her.”

“What happened after?”

Zach shook his head. “She survived. But I wasn’t sure we would or even if we should. I waited every day for her to tell me she was leaving me. We married because she was pregnant. Then she wasn’t. But she never left me. Still, that year was hell for us. I had a nineteen-year-old wife I barely knew who had to transfer to King’s College in London after I left Cambridge, left before they could fire me.”

“But you stayed married.”

“We did. How or why, I don’t know.”

“Because she loved you, Zach. And because you loved her.”

“I did. Not that it matters.”

“Why doesn’t it?”

“Because we’re over. She’s made that perfectly clear.”

“How do you know it’s over?”

“Because she left me, Nora,” Zach said, letting irritation seep into his voice.

“She left you?” Nora seemed unfazed by his anger. “Aren’t you the one who packed up, boarded a plane and moved across an ocean?”

“She left me long before that.”

“Tell me.” Nora’s voice was insistent, hypnotic and musical. Unable to see, Zach felt uncoupled from the ground, unmoored. Nothing seemed real. It was easier to make his confession in this kind of darkness.

“Two years ago Grace told me she wanted us to try again. Try again—as if we were trying the first time.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she nearly died because of my mistake, and I would never let that happen again. After that, she started to fade out on me. First she stopped making our coffee in the morning. Another month passed and she stopped reading with me in the evenings. She didn’t leave all at once. Just room by room. She left the bedroom last. I told her about the job here. She told me to go if that’s what I wanted. But she was already gone. I did leave, but she left me first.”

“Can I tell you a secret, Zach?” Nora’s voice came from over his shoulder. “I would have left you, too.”