JJ nudged her shoulder. “Come on, Dolly, it can’t be that bad.” But when she looked up at him, his brow furrowed at the pain in her eyes, and he took her into his arms. “I’m sorry, Dolly,” he whispered into her hair. Deftly, he plucked the cigarette from her fingers and disposed of it in an empty glass that had been abandoned on the window seat. Her stomach was pulsing with nausea. “Wait,” she said, like a drowning woman popping above the surface for a too-brief instant, as his lips traced her neck and his hand carved out the shape of her curves, lingering on her breast, her hip.

“Are you going to leave him?” he murmured.

“Wait,” she protested again, knowing this was what she had come here for, wanting it and not wanting it at once.

“You should leave him, Dolly,” he whispered, pressing close.

At the thought of it, she couldn’t keep her sobs at bay. JJ’s hold on her seemed to grow tighter. The length of his thin body pinned her against the corner by the window. “JJ,” she hiccuped, pushing at him.

But when she looked up, the set of his jaw made sweat pop from her pores. “JJ?”

He swallowed. Then his eyes and mouth softened. “Dolly,” he said. “Do you think you could ever love me?”

Her mouth fell open.

He looked into her eyes a moment, then ducked his head. He let her go, and turned away. “Christ,” he said. “I’m such an idiot.”

Dolly hugged herself tight, pressing her back against the wall.

“‘Oh, our lives’ sweetness!’” he said. “‘That we would hourly die / Rather than die at once!’”

“What?”

He ran his hand over his hair. “Edgar from King Lear. I didn’t know what it meant, when I was in the play in high school. Right before the war. I just said the line, and I didn’t know what it meant. Now I think about it all the time. That we would hourly die rather than die at once.”

“What does it mean?”

“Think about it, Dolly.”

But she couldn’t think. She was trembling with dread at her own immorality, yet half of her wished he would come back and hold her again. But even as her mind reviewed the picture of Byron leaving Shorty’s with that woman, her wedding ring felt so heavy that she could hardly lift her left hand. This was what she got for having been raised with moral values: a maddening inability to take satisfaction in revenge.

Glancing over his shoulder, he met her eyes. “You saw him with another woman, right? You don’t have to put up with that. My grandma left my grandpa, after she found out about Nick being his.”

“She did?”

He nodded. “Are you going to leave your husband?”