“Hello, you’ve reached Adrienne Adler, Events Director at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m not able to take your call right now, but leave me a message and I promise to get back to you as soon as possible.”

Blinking, heart beating, adrenaline pumping, I clicked the phone off.

Adler. Adler. Adler.

Jewish?

German?

German-Jewish?

Getting that one bit of information—her last name—that one detail, that one piece of the puzzle, made me hungry for more: I wanted to Google her on the Internet and see what came up, but Donald’s computer was off and I wasn’t about to turn it on. Since online spying was off limits for now (I’d do that later, when I got home, I knew), I focused on my next order of business: I needed to find that photograph.

But before I could see past the checkbook, sunglasses, and cellular phone bill in the top drawer of his desk, I heard the upstairs toilet flush. And for a split second I panicked:

Donald was awake.

He would catch me in his office, going through his personal belongings.

If I was lucky, he would ask me to explain myself before throwing me out of his house and onto the street.

And what would I say?

That I was spying on his ex-girlfriend?

That I was trying to use ESP on his dog to find out where the big treasure trove of Adrienne memorabilia might be hidden?

Even if Donald didn’t immediately figure out what I was looking for (and why would he? He’d given me no just cause for paranoid suspicions), he would know my behavior was bizarre and inappropriate; at the very least, he would think I was looking for money, or valuables, to steal. Without waiting another second to comprehend what that would mean for our relationship (quite simply: the end of it), I jumped out of the chair and over Lucy, ran up the stairs, and explained to him as I lured him back into bed that I’d just gone down to the kitchen to get some water because I was thirsty. Letting himself be seduced, he smiled at me as if he knew what I was up to.

It could have ended then and there, with the address book, and the single instance of calling Adrienne’s office, and the single white lie to Donald. After all, Donald had never given me any reason to suspect he was capable of duplicity or infidelity; nothing in his past pointed to such behavior (he’d never been unfaithful to any girlfriend he’d ever had—at least, that’s what he’d told me).

But of course, it did not.

It went on. And on. And on.

The following week, under similar circumstances (the cover of darkness, Donald asleep, the dog wetly snoring—in collusion? I liked to think so, anyway—at my feet), I found a torturously incomplete batch of pictures of Lucy with a woman’s (Adrienne’s, obviously) lean, tan, fit arm and engagement-ring-bejeweled hand around her neck.

The week after that, I found a photo of Donald, Lucy, and Adrienne at the beach (“We Three: Sagaponack, August, 1996” said the notation on the back in handwriting and language I knew were not his).