She started to reach for another packet of pretzels that she’d brought with her from her seat, but I took them away from her. “Answer me first!” I demanded.

She sat back, cleared her throat. “I’d say it happened exactly as he said it happened. Adrienne called him, they got disconnected, he was waiting for her to call back immediately.”

Perverse as it may sound, that was not what I wanted to hear.

I wanted to hear a different explanation—something completely incriminating: Adrienne was calling him not from her cell phone, but from an air phone on the shuttle headed to Washington, where she and Donald would spend the weekend together while I was away; the minute I turned my back on him, he and Adrienne were in communication.

“Rubbish,” Gayle pronounced, poking around my seat back for any uneaten packets of pretzels. “You’re reading too much into things.”

“Why are you always defending her?”

“I am not always defending her. I’m just trying to allay your supreme paranoia.”

Just then, Fran appeared in the aisle. Judging from where a matchbook was inserted between pages, it looked as if she was more than halfway through one of those giant mass-market paperbacks that Anne had given me and I had given Fran. The midnight-blue and gold-foil cover, bent and cracked, was already showing the strain of Fran’s abuse. “What are you two talking about?” she asked.

Gayle and I looked at each other, me trying to signal her not to tell Fran what I’d just told her about my phone call to Donald, but she didn’t pick up on it. Instead, she sang like a canary.

“Oh, great,” Fran said, rolling her eyes so vigorously that her entire head pivoted and her hair flopped from side to side, like a mop. “I’m wasting my one day off to help you find a dress for a wedding that might never even take place.”

The pilot turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign, announced we were beginning to descend. The verb seemed prescient; Fran returned to her seat, Gayle returned to hers, and I was left alone in mine to wallow in uncertainty and deep suspicion.

So absorbed was I in conspiracy theories (Donald had encouraged me to go to New York to shop, hadn’t he? The incredible irony of my shopping for a wedding dress during their first, presumably, reconnective tryst must have made Adrienne scream with Schadenfreude) that I barely noticed our extremely bumpy landing.

Instead of calling Donald from my cell phone the minute we were on the ground, as I usually would to let him know I’d arrived safely, I decided to punish him for whatever he’d been doing with Adrienne earlier: I wouldn’t call him, and I shut my phone off so he couldn’t call me.