NO THREE DAYS of Leora’s entire life ever passed more slowly than those three days. She spent her last afternoon in Amsterdam wandering the canals in a daze, feeling the ground sinking underneath her. On the flight home she didn’t sleep, or listen to her interview tapes, or read through her notes, or even read a book. Instead she watched the in-flight movie screen for hours without bothering to put on the headphones. Back at her apartment, she ducked into her room before Lauren or Melanie could ask her about her trip and left a message on her parents’ answering machine telling them that she was going to bed so they shouldn’t call her back. Then she lay on her futon all night, staring at the ceiling with its peeling paint.

At work the following day she acted like a zombie, ignoring routine tasks and failing to show up for the daily section meeting, thus subjecting herself to a barrage of jokes from Jeff about all the pot she must have smoked up in Amsterdam. When he asked her about her trip, she fended off his questions with claims of jet lag until he left her alone. She sat at her desk waiting for time to pass, surfing the Web until she had tracked down everything she could find about Jake. She found his last name on the conference’s site, and then she hunted further. He was listed as an assistant professor at Columbia, and he had his syllabus posted for one of the courses he was teaching—something about the history of modern Jewish thought. She also found a review in one of the academic journals of some book he had helped edit. Address searches showed that he lived about twelve blocks away from her. She flipped through the newspaper aimlessly as the hours dragged on. At twenty minutes to five, she told Suzanne that she needed to sleep off her jet lag, grabbed her coat, and ran for the subway.