Though Adrienne didn’t disappear completely from our lives, she did recede. Now that the strongest link between her and Donald had been broken—Lucy—there was little to connect them to each other. There were no more phone calls; no more dinner dates; no more invitations to come to brunch. The pretense of friendship between the two of them, and the three of us, had finally dissolved.

Donald heard from Terrance that they had stopped seeing each other. It had ended badly, of course. Adrienne had dumped him unceremoniously, without apology, and with little explanation shortly after the denouement in her side yard. Francesco was back in the picture—assuming he was ever really out of it to begin with—and it wasn’t long before we found out that she was leaving her job at the National Gallery and heading back to New York. With the dog gone and her attempts to interfere with Donald and me all but thwarted, it seemed there was no reason whatsoever for her to stay.

Pondering the news of her retreat, I think we all—Donald, Terrance, and I—breathed a collective sigh of relief. We were free of her, finally; free of her seductions, manipulations, complications— real or imagined—and the havoc she wreaked.

But I am still not free of the memory of her and of my maniacal behavior. Like an illness, it lingers unpleasantly in the flesh, in the bones, in the mind.

One day in mid-March when I was home, working at my desk, a package arrived, hand-delivered by a DHL courier. It was from Antwerp, Belgium, and I knew immediately that it was the wedding dress from Dries. Afraid to open the box, I brought it upstairs. I put it in the back of my closet, next to a stack of boxes filled with shoes I never wear anymore.

It’s still there, in fact, the dress; still unopened. I never did have any use for it, even though Donald and I did get married, as planned, several weeks later. But instead of trying to fulfill Fran and Adrienne’s aesthetic visions of the perfect, indescribable, nothing-else-quite-like-it-in-the-world kind of gown, I wore a simple white dress, off the shoulder, that I bought up the street, off the rack, at Neiman’s. It was a perfect April day, and somehow it all went off without a hitch.

Sometimes I still get the urge to drive down Morrison Street; to go through Donald’s pockets; to sit up late at night, looking at his sleeping face, searching for signs that he doesn’t love me anymore, that he will leave me, that our life together is over.

But those are tics; involuntary outbursts of uncertainty and fear.