That fall he raked a pile of leaves in the backyard to burn them, and on an impulse, after he’d started the fire, he retrieved the shoe box from under the bed and threw it into the flames. The box smoked and caught and split open, the envelopes caught, the letters inside, but then the burning pages took flight in the draft and swirled up high over his head, dozens of fluttering sparks, lighting in the pine trees, drifting back, alarmingly, toward the house, before they burned out. Some pages were nearly whole, and these he caught and balled up and threw back into the fire, but most of the floating sparks were flakes and shards of paper, and they scattered all over the yard.

He finds the pieces still, months later, little white flakes singed around the edges, nestled in the crabgrass by the house or out along the far side of the yard, where the woods begin. Fragments of words and sentences, a man’s cursive in blue ink, blurred so much by the weather that most of them he can’t make out … sweet breath … your flower … every night I dream … He leaves them be.

They never went back to Cape May, and they never spoke to each other about their honeymoon. Sometimes, when they fought, he could feel it just under the surface—the knowledge of what they were capable of. “You’re no angel either,” he once said to her, in an argument he can no longer remember. But that was all. When Anne, planning her own honeymoon, asked them about theirs, Effie said only that the weather had been poor, and that they should have gone to Florida.

How young and foolish he once was. How naïve when, for a brief moment, he imagined running away with a girl he barely knew. He understands now the way desire spreads, like heat—how, when he and Effie discovered it in each other, they awoke to the swollen desirability all around them. He hadn’t been able to resist it. Neither had she. If she ever forgave him, he couldn’t say, but he could forgive her for Charlie Morrell.

Now he can feel her drifting away, when he looks through their photo albums: he feels the contours softening. The light surrounding them turns more flattering. Henry believes in heaven, as he always has, but lately it no longer comforts him. If it’s true that in heaven everyone will be free from sin, then in heaven all the people he has ever loved, though he may recognize their faces, will be strangers to him.

He imagines them all around him, a multitude—Effie beside him, divinely serene and pure.