“I guess she was just your employer for a short time,” he said. “I don’t know if any of this matters to you.”

I nodded. “It does,” I said.

“I guess you knew everything that was going on too.”

The dates in her diary worked out so the affair had to have started before the baby. William looks so much like James, I don’t bother questioning his paternity. It must have been strange, though, to watch someone else’s baby grow inside a woman you’re making love to. That point she mentioned, in the second trimester, when she could ravage any and all food within sight, was he there? I picture them naked, him feeding her mangos, smoked salmon, avocado—foods smooth and slippery, like the inside of mouths.

Did he wonder if it could be his?

I nodded again, slowly, trying to meet his gaze. I felt like if I could just make eye contact with him we could communicate some kind of understanding about Lonnie—about how she had meant something large to both of us. I felt like we could regroup something somehow if he would just look at me. But his face was still turned slightly away.

The not-knowing. All of life’s unanswerable questions—the matter we cannot see, the mysterious randomness that allows birth and death—were bottled inside my inability to truly know Lonnie. If only I had given it a little more time. Maybe she would have unrolled her life like a rug in front of me, laid it down in front of my feet and said, “Here, look at this. This is everything.”

I thought, bitterly, here’s your story, Sienna. It’s another bad one; in fact, I’m not convinced it’s any better than my wrapping-paper story. I was expecting something from her, something large, but what I found was as banal as a pun—love. Just a dumb love story. It was love, whatever that means, and I messed it up. I’d really got it all wrong. I’d wanted too much from her, wanted to conquer her, to become her, to encase her in my life in order to write her out of her own.

“Did she really leave William?” I asked. “James said she left him.”

“I don’t know,” he said, vaguely, like he hadn’t thought about it and didn’t really care. “James and I haven’t exactly kept in touch.”

He finished his beer in one last gulp, said, “Excuse me,” and headed to the bathroom.

By the time he returned the moment had passed. I no longer cared where he was looking. “Do you want to get drunk—really drunk—with me?” he said.