How gentle and patient, in retrospect, her initiation of him had been. Their meetings took place mostly in her house, because Sam worked in Boston and Ann didn’t. Frank remembered, rounding the rack of condoms into a realm of packaged antihistamine capsules, how the driveway of her house, which sat on the edge of town, next to a horse farm and riding stable, was hidden behind a tilting tall stockade-style fence and a mass of overgrown lilacs. Sam would talk of replacing the fence and pruning the lilacs but didn’t do it that summer. Approaching, Frank needed to slow for the hairpin turn into the driveway; it was a dangerous moment when his car might have been recognized on the road—several of their friends’ children took riding lessons—and he would hold his breath as, half hidden behind the great straggly lilacs, he would glide across the crackling gravel and into the garage. Maggie would have swung up the garage door for him, which took some strength in this era before electronic controls. She would be waiting for him behind the connecting door into the kitchen, in a bathing suit or less. His eyes would still be adjusting from sunlight. She would bound into his arms like a long, smooth, shivering puppy. He stared at the Sudafed and Contac, his whole body swollen by a stupid indignation at having lost all that.

At last, making a few distracted purchases by way of paying for the shelter, he dared leave the drugstore. He looked down the street and saw with relief that the vista of icicled shops held no red glint. Heart pounding, as if he were being pursued by an enemy, he made his way to his car and returned to his house. It was a weather-tight box, a well-built tract house on a two-acre square of land. The foundation-masking shrubs newly planted when they moved in now looked overgrown, crowding the brick steps and front windows. In the kitchen, Ann, in her tan loden coat, was unpacking bags of groceries into the refrigerator; her face as she turned to him wore a slant expression, brimming with wary mischief. “I saw an old friend of yours in the Stop & Shop.” The giant bright supermarket was part of a mall that had arisen in the farm country, slowly going under to development, between the town they had left and the town where they lived.

“Who?” he asked, though from the peculiar liveliness of her expression he had already guessed.

“Maggie Linsford. Or whatever her name is now.” Maggie had taken back her maiden name after her divorce from Sam, and Ann could never be bothered to remember it.

“Chase,” Frank said. “Unless she’s remarried.”

“She wouldn’t do that to you. What’s in that bag in your hand?”

“Razor blades. Sudafed. And I got you some of that perfumed French bath gel you like. ‘Dorlotez-vous,’ the label says.”