You look at a map of Canada on your phone instead. It’s so vast, is what gets you, there’s just so much space; the cities of Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal and then Quebec City in a tidy row just up from New York state and the US border; and above them the open space of Ontario and Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador; and westwards beyond that the breadth of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and British Columbia; Vancouver, where he was born and lived for the two and a half decades of his marriage, and northwards of it the Yukon and the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, the whole sweep of it, so empty, so much, that you have to hold on to the balustrade to steady yourself, on the verge of doubling over with a sort of homesickness, this sudden intensity of loss.

Breathe, you tell yourself, just breathe.

Your husband is only doing his best. He’s been so worried, since Tilly was born, and you stopped work, about providing 134for you; about the precariousness of his industry; about what it means to be a family. He’s doing his best and you think that you must do your best too, to still love him, and you think that love gone wrong or astray is also a kind of exile.

It was right, you tell yourself, not to accept the lift. It would have been a line crossed; some new frontier, new country, from which you might not have returned.

And yet.

You wonder, can’t help yourself wondering, what it would have been like had you gone with him: in his executive car, even back to his hotel, maybe, where he holds you in his arms; kneels before you and presses his face to you; eases your jeans from your hips and unbuttons your shirt and lays you carefully on his bed; and maybe that’s what you want, for someone to undress you and lay you down, to make the decisions for you; but however you try to stage the sequence in your head, you can’t get past the fact of your daughter there, and the whole thing dissipates.