Women, Uncle Carswall might say, if Henry could somehow tell him what had happened in a way that removed the sordidness from it, and his own culpability. Damn them, son, they’ll bring you nothing but misery. But you have to bear it.

And he would. He knew this already. He wasn’t going to walk out on her. She was his wife, and she belonged to him.

He’d brought his suitcase up to one of the second-floor bedrooms—a bright-yellow room with white curtains—and he dressed there and, taking a moment to collect himself, went up to the attic room. But Effie wasn’t there. He went down to the living room and she wasn’t there, either, and he panicked, calling her name—until he found her, to his relief, sitting out on the back porch steps. She glanced back at him miserably.

He sat down beside her. Streaks of sunlight lay across the fallen leaves in the backyard. Fall had arrived.

“I can’t stop crying,” she said. “I knew if I started…”

She wept, hugging herself, and after hesitating a moment, he put his arm around her. She leaned into him, and rested her head on his shoulder.

For supper they ate at the diner they’d gone to their first day—almost three weeks ago now—and sat at the same booth by the window. It was a Friday evening, and a few other people were there. A man in a plaid shirt and suspenders, eating alone. A trio of women in nurses’ uniforms. Their waitress was an old woman with horn-rimmed glasses. Henry ordered the chicken-fried steak, Effie ordered a Cobb salad, but when their food came, she only picked at it. Her stomach didn’t feel right, she said. Neither did his, he said. But he hadn’t eaten in over a day, and so he forced himself. They said little. On the radio behind the bar a news program was playing. The Soviets had sent a machine of some kind up into outer space, and all the world was in a clamor. It was enough to draw their attention away from themselves.

“Huh,” Effie said. “That’s interesting.”

They walked back to the cottage in the last light of dusk. Halfway there he took her hand, and she smiled up at him, her eyes watering, whether from emotion or because of the wind, he didn’t know. They passed Clara’s, on the opposite side of the street, and made no comment. The downstairs windows were alight. He could smell chimney smoke in the air.