I propped up two oversized velvet pillows, sat with my back against them. Speechless, I stared at Gayle. She was right. We were both failing that test, Donald and me.

Miserably. Epically. With flying colors.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “How to reverse it. How to stop this . . . downward spiral. I’m so paranoid I even drove by Adrienne’s house on the way here. I don’t trust him, and now he doesn’t trust me. I betrayed him, and now I’m afraid he will finally betray me: he’ll go back to her like I’ve always suspected he would.”

“Look, listen,” she started, her voice stern, “you have no reason in the world to think that. Donald has said nothing, done nothing to lead you to believe he is going to leave you for Adrienne. This is all simply a figment of your overactive imagination.”

She blinked; I blinked; we said nothing.

“Now get up and let’s go.”

I sat up, took note. “Go where?”

“Do you not follow?”

I shook my head; I didn’t.

“You and I are going to drive by Adrienne’s house again, of course. And this time, when you find nothing and see that there’s absolutely no reason for you to be acting so crazily, you will, once and for all, finally be cured of these ridiculous thoughts.”

First, we drove by our house, Donald’s and mine. And when we did, his car was gone.

“He’s not here,” I said to Gayle.

“Yes I can see that.”

I felt full of dread. “Maybe he’s with her.”

“Stop it!”

“No really. Maybe after our fight, he got so fed up with me and my lunacy that he just got in the car and drove straight over to her house. Maybe he’s been there all this time. Since right after I drove by and went to your house.”

“You are mad,” Gayle pronounced. I hoped and prayed she was right.

I was speeding up Connecticut now, up past the small scruffy patch of urban campus that was the University of the District of Columbia at Van Ness; up past Politics and Prose again; up past the sparse clusters of neighborhood dry cleaners and restaurants and drugstores and into Chevy Chase. I swerved, changed lanes at will. As we approached the Safeway, I screeched over two lanes from the left-most one and took a sharp right onto Morrison Street.