He didn’t recognize the voice at first and thought maybe all this time he’d actually had the number wrong. But he’d woken her, that’s what it was. She was not, in fact, still in Dallas; she was across the world in Florence, Italy, where it was at that very moment four o’clock in the morning. Darren was mortified. He began apologizing profusely—feeling also a quiet disappointment over the distance between them—but Randie stopped him and said, “It’s okay. I’m glad to hear from you.” Her voice was rough with sleep, but it took him back. Boy, did it take him back. To that juke joint just over the Shelby County line in the town of Garrison, the night they’d gotten drunk and talked about their lives and loves. He could still see the colored bar lights playing across her skin as she told the story of Joe and Geneva Sweet, the tale of a love that was fate or happenstance, depending on your point of view on that sort of thing. Either way, it was the story of two people whose lives crossed unexpectedly in the town of Lark, Texas, and the love that had pulled them off the road they’d been living on, sat them down, and whispered, This. Pay attention to this here. Through the phone, he could hear her moving around in the bed, could picture her in her hotel room reaching over to turn on the lamp, something porcelain and hand-painted, then sitting up and resting against the padded headboard. “You called,” she said. And with no hint of playful rebuke, nothing to suggest she wasn’t utterly serious about having been made to wait for him, she added, “Finally.”

“Can I ask you something?” he said, speaking quickly, before he lost his nerve. “And you just answer me and not ask me anything in return?”

“Yes,” she said in a way that suggested she’d been waiting for this. This question, this phone call, this moment.

Darren lowered his head to the floor until he found his voice again. “How did you know Michael had cheated on you?”

“Oh boy.” It was a whisper followed by a length of silence so devoid of breath and speech that Darren thought he could hear the sounds of early-morning delivery trucks on some Florentine street below her room. “Oh no.”

“Greg,” he whispered.

“Your friend?”

And then, because he felt ashamed—not just of the possibility of being a cuckold but of the quiet knowledge that he’d used this as a pretext to call another woman—he said, “I don’t know.” What did he know, really? Only that he’d walked into this hotel room alone and wanted to talk to Randie.

“I don’t think I can do this, Darren.”