Lisa and I had been together, happily unmarried, for five years when we decided to try to have a kid. We had a big family wedding at a hotel down the street from the beach house, soon after which Lisa got pregnant and had Amanda. (Best not to count the months on that one, actually.) These were good years. I was a senior editor at a news aggregator during a brief window of profitability, a job I didn’t have to care too much about. Lisa was able to quit her EPA job to stay home with Amanda for the first couple of years and get by with some consulting on the side. When she went back to work directing an environmental nonprofit, Amanda was in preschool, and I was able to fix my schedule around picking her up and watching her in the afternoons.

One night, Lisa came home from a fund-raising trip asking for an open marriage. When I pressed her on the reason, she told me, after a few deflections, that she’d been sleeping with her friend Tim, with whom she’d gone to Dartmouth, and felt terrible about it. She cried, I cried. She agreed to break it off, then didn’t. The other guy made his case for true love, reminded her that life was short—all that nineteenth-century shit. (He was an assistant professor of literature at Amherst, but his guy was Wallace Stevens. Dignity isn’t transmitted via dissertation.) My reliably cynical wife, with a degree in art history and a master’s in water engineering, bought it.

On a Sunday afternoon in March, she drove from our apartment in Boston out to Western Massachusetts, taking her clothes, books, and some random kitchen supplies. It was an indefinite experiment. She’d commute or work from wherever they were living, or something—for all I knew, Vronsky was promising to take care of her with his trust fund. We agreed that Amanda would visit her on the weekends and during school vacations. She had just turned seven, and we agreed to spin the separation as a work-related necessity until we figured out something better.