The dull drive increased the fatigue she had been feeling for hours. She had not slept all night. She had first lain in bed, then sat by the window, struggling with all the twistings of emotion and conscience, desire and regret, longing and recrimination. She didn’t know exactly when she had decided on this manifestly rash, dangerous plan. She had been thinking about it—and trying not to think about it—since the day she first met Hooper. She had weighed the risks and, somehow, calculated that they were worth taking, though she was not entirely sure what she could gain from the adventure. She knew she wanted change, almost any change. She wanted to be assured and reassured that she was desirable—not just to her husband, for she had grown complacent about that, but to the people she saw as her real peers, the people among whom she still numbered herself. She felt that without some remedy, the part of herself that she most cherished would die. Perhaps the past could never be revived. But perhaps it could be recalled physically as well as mentally. She wanted an injection, a transfusion of the essence of her past, and she saw Matt Hooper as the only possible donor. The thought of love never entered her mind. Nor did she want or anticipate a relationship either profound or enduring. She sought only to be serviced, restored.

She was grateful that the work assigned her when she arrived at the hospital demanded concentration and conversation, for it prevented her from thinking. She and another volunteer changed the bedding of the elderly patients for whom the hospital community was a surrogate—and, in some cases, final—home. She had to remember the names of children in distant cities, had to fashion new excuses for why they hadn’t written. She had to feign recollection of the plots of television shows and speculate on why such-and-such a character had left his wife for a woman who was patently an adventuress.

At 11:45, Ellen told the supervisor of volunteers that she didn’t feel well. Her thyroid was acting up again, she said, and she was getting her period. She thought she’d go lie down for a while in the staff lounge. And if a nap didn’t help, she said, she’d probably go home. In fact, if she wasn’t back on the job by 1:30 or so, the supervisor could assume she had gone home. It was an explanation that she hoped was vague enough to discourage anyone from actively looking for her.

She went into the lounge, counted to twenty, and opened the door a crack to see if the corridor was empty. It was; most of the staff were in, or on their way to, the cafeteria on the other side of the building. She stepped into the corridor, closed the door softly behind her, and hurried around a corner and out a side door of the hospital that led to the staff parking lot.

She drove most of the way to Sag Harbor, then stopped at a gas station. When the tank was full and the gas paid for, she asked to use the ladies’ room. The attendant gave her the key, and she pulled her car around to the side of the station, next to the ladies’ room door. She opened the door, but before going into the ladies’ room she returned the key to the attendant. She walked to her car, removed the plastic bag from the back seat, entered the ladies’ room, and pushed the button that locked the door.