I stopped listening. Her voice was like the fading call of a nearby bird, slowly disappearing into white noise. And as it did, I couldn’t help reliving, over and over again, those shocking moments in front of Adrienne’s house. Remembering the horrifying scenes in The Portrait of a Lady in which Isabel Archer continually comes upon her husband with the worldly, smiling Madame Merle, I couldn’t help but feel devastated: even Donald, the most honest, true, loyal man I’d ever known and had ever hoped to know, couldn’t be trusted.

I followed Gayle to the hostess stand, where we were handed menus and waved forward to our table. So lost in thought was I about the day’s terrifically depressing events that I barely noticed when Gayle turned around, full circle, and said, rather loudly: “He’s here!”

“Who?” I asked.

“Donald! Over on the right! In a booth!”

I felt my adrenal glands go into overtime for the second time that day. I didn’t know how much more of this extreme shock I could take. Looking across the restaurant, I saw what Gayle had seen: Donald, sitting quietly in a turquoise pleather booth, his head of wavy hair lowered. He was drowning his sorrows in a bowl of chicken soup and a Reuben sandwich.

A child of divorce, Donald always had been completely susceptible to comfort food.

There were two options, and only seconds to decide between them: Either we would sneak past Donald to our table and not acknowledge his presence, or we would go up to his table and pretend we hadn’t just spent the last hour spying on him and Adrienne (leaving the restaurant altogether without eating wasn’t an option, I knew, with Gayle in tow)—

Donald was standing up suddenly, beside the booth, waving frantically. Oddly enough, he seemed incredibly happy to see us.

“I’m so glad to see you both,” he said, smiling warmly (sheepishly?) at me as Gayle and I stood there, holding our plastic menus. “What are you doing here?”

Gayle looked like she was ready to burst at the seams, barely able to keep herself from telling Donald everything that had happened, so I forced myself to answer his question:

“We were just,” I said tauntingly, “driving by. Gayle was hungry.”

Donald tried to catch my eye, but I avoided looking straight at him. I couldn’t bear to face him right now, knowing what I knew.

“Big surprise,” he said, trying to engage me in a private joke about Gayle’s incessant appetite, but I just eyed him coldly.

Gayle, ignoring any psychological subtleties, drove the point home. “Yes, I’m famished.”

A second or two lapsed; Donald looked at each of us, then at the table. “Come on. Sit down. Join me.”

Before I could protest, invent an excuse, Gayle slid into the booth. Reluctantly, I slid in after her.