On the nights I drove by her house and her car wasn’t there, I would cruise the neighborhood, a little frantically, looking for it (luckily, there weren’t that many midnight-blue convertible Porsche Boxsters around, with National Gallery of Art parking permits and Yale University stickers, so it was fairly easy to spot). Once or twice I found it in the Safeway parking lot just around the corner from her house; another time I came upon it almost by accident parked down a side street near Politics and Prose (I’d assumed she was inside, attending a reading); I even spotted it in the parking garage of Mazza Gallerie, the nearby mall, when I was in truth going to Neiman’s to inspect their shoe selection (I didn’t go into the store that night, of course, but parked for a while on the opposite side of the parking level until I saw her go to her car, shopping bags in tow; then followed her home).

Several weeks passed; I found nothing of substance. But I remained unconvinced.

Donald, by this time, was getting suspicious himself. It seemed I’d been spending so much time spying on him and Adrienne that he’d started to wonder.

“You’re never home anymore,” he said plaintively one night. It was a cold evening in late February and he was sitting in the dining room, staring at a rotisserie chicken I’d picked up that morning at Fresh Fields. He’d set the table for two while I was upstairs; long white candles were even waiting in their silver holders to be lit. But I had my coat on and my keys in my hand, all ready to go out into the night.

“I’m always home,” I said, huffing, puffing, with the kind of light sarcastic tone liars use when they’re covering their tracks.

“No you’re not. I mean, right now, for instance. You’re on your way out. Again. If I’d come home five minutes later, I would have missed you.”

I nodded, said nothing. He was right. I had the note I was going to leave for him (“See you around nine. Organic, free-range, politically correct chicken in the fridge”) right there, in my pocket.

“So, where are you off to tonight?”

Tonight? I thought quickly, scanned the excuses I’d used over the past week. There had been the evening lecture series on the Human Genome Project at the Smithsonian that I’d said I’d been attending on Monday nights. The classics book club at Politics and Prose I’d said I’d been going to on Tuesday nights. Wednesday nights I usually used Gayle as a cover. Thursday and Friday evenings were swing nights (no set excuses; home from surveillance by seven-thirty at the latest, in time for dinner): necessitating a potpourri of miscellaneous unforeseen errands (shoe shopping, food shopping, video rentals and returns).