“That might not be geography so much as time.”

“Maybe.” Elizabeth stands and releases the shiny chains. “Maybe this is just what getting older feels like.”

I brush dust from the back of her jeans. “Well, if this is what getting old looks like, we’re in good shape.”

“I said ‘older,’ Robert.” She puts her hands in her back pockets and returns to the street. This time she leads the way.

So she’s restless. Not terribly surprising, and it wouldn’t be the first time. Romanticizing her former life, though? Yes, this surprises me. I pulled her out of a quagmire she couldn’t escape on her own, and she thanked me. She was miserable when we met, drowning in debt, unemployable, unemployed. What on earth had she planned to do with a PhD in Comparative Literature anyway? What did she expect her life to look like when she married a poet—a rookie professor of poetry, no less, as if being a poet wasn’t bad enough?

He was faculty at Columbia at the time. She was a doctoral candidate in the same department. Realistically, she’d never have gotten a job in New York straight out of school, not at Columbia or anywhere, anyway. She’d have had to move someplace awful to find a vacancy, someplace dreary and Midwestern, and how would her marriage have fared then? Stuart wasn’t going to leave his adjunct professorship, unstable and insignificant as it was. The Ivy League credential mattered to him, just as the Ivy League education mattered to her. Some people are like that, fine. But she was the one who attended a conference at the medical school just to escape the confines of her department, just to hear someone talk about facts and science for a change, and she was the one who approached me after my panel to say how much she appreciated my insight into the future of health care in America. She was the one who left her wedding ring at home that morning. Her eyes had been bloodshot and weary—the result of sleepless nights tackling her dissertation topic: Postmodern Applications of Classical Theory on the Feminine Sublime, or something, I soon learned—and her voice had been raspy and soft. I now know she’d only gone hoarse on account of fatigue and cigarettes, that she wouldn’t always sound like Kathleen Turner, but something about her timbre threw me. She shook my hand and looked at me like a little girl trying to buy a ticket to my ferry heading far away from her island. Anywhere but here, her eyes seemed to say.