I really did leave my first ring in that worthless ultrasonic cleaner on the day I wandered into Robert’s seminar at Columbia. I truly forgot to put it back on my hand—an honest mistake, with a case to be made for selective memory—but Robert had no excuse. He left his wedding band behind on purpose. All it took was me introducing myself after his lecture for Robert to suggest we continue our conversation over drinks. I knew he would seduce me with his body language, with his other world, with a life I recognized from magazines and soap operas and Victorian novels, and I was ready to seduce him in turn. I fancied myself Colette bypassing her vagabond years, flying straight into the arms of high-brow Husband Number Two. How tired I was then, having learned as all spoiled bohemians do that Bohemia is only fit for Prague and fiction, when along came Robert Hart, MD, booking suites at The Lucerne twice a week, insisting I order whatever I desired from a room service menu that never changed. And so I ate duck à l’orange and steak au poivre and escargot and pot de crème, and I took bubble baths in an actual bathtub, and for two months, I was in heaven. This was before the menu grew tiresome, before Stuart grew suspicious, then wise—long before Robert would start expecting me to be the one to prepare the pot de crème, the duck à l’orange, the steak tartare. The tartar sauce.

I fan my fingers, letting my diamond catch light, throwing rainbow confetti on the ceiling of this train car. A little girl pops her head over the back of the seat in front of me, raises her eyebrows and puckers her mouth in the shape of ooh with no sound. I smile and rock my hand back and forth, demonstrating cause and effect for the towhead with a sateen bow in her hair, and we ooh silently together until her mother asks her to please sit on her bottom.

Rolling past Babylon, I swap one book of poems for another, running my hand over the cover of a Moleskine I haven’t touched in ages and hesitate to crack, even now. My body warms just holding it. If I break the seal, I’ll have to negotiate whether the warmth is warranted—whether its pages deserve their place in my heart—jeopardizing the reasons I hold them dear. There was never a reason to have hidden the book all these years, except for the vague comfort drawn from knowing relics of my former life exist, carefully preserved just so I can keep a secret with myself. A book of poems. A ratty T-shirt stolen on my way out, plucked from the bottom of Stuart’s hamper, just-in-case. I was afraid of wanting both worlds, of craving his smell, but I chose Robert and never looked back.