That dream ended forty-five days after it began.

Nearly seven weeks after they consummated their desire in the X-ray room, Viola suddenly changed. The previous day, Tom had rendezvoused with her as usual, and her eyes had shone with boundless love. The next morning, when he saw her in the clinic, the light had gone out of her eyes, and impassable walls had been raised around her. When he tried to question her, she only shook her head and hurried on to the next patient. Without saying anything, Viola made it clear that Tom Cage was as irrevocably part of her past as her dead husband. At first he thought she must have received some bad news about her brother. But during a tense coffee break she told him that Jimmy was still hiding in Freewoods, though chafing to return to Natchez and “the struggle.” After two hours of dazed disbelief, Tom finally cornered Viola in an examining room and demanded an explanation for the distance between them.

“You have a family,” she said with lacerating formality. “If we’d kept going, we would have destroyed that. We have no right to do that. You can’t build happiness on someone else’s pain.”

Before Tom could answer, she brushed past him and went back to work. As the day wore on, Tom rehearsed a thousand arguments in his mind, but the more he tried to argue with her premise, the more right he realized she was. He’d been in denial from the beginning, and Viola had simply chosen to force him out of it. There were only two possible endings for their relationship: in Scenario One, Tom would keep his family and Viola would be alone, at least until she found someone new; in Scenario Two … well, Scenario Two was unthinkable. If Tom tried to possess Viola, he would destroy his family, his career, Viola, and possibly even himself.

In truth, both scenarios seemed unendurable. To lose Viola would be agony, yet to give up his family would mean betraying his deepest convictions. Then, like an unexpected blow, the full weight of the first possibility struck Tom: to see Viola in love with someone else … that might well shatter him. After this realization, every moment of that day became a struggle to maintain control of himself. He was trying to figure out some Solomonic solution when Dr. Lucas called him into his office and told him that Viola had asked to be assigned to Dr. Ross, a GP Lucas had hired two months earlier. Ross was only two years out of medical school, and Dr. Lucas told Tom that both Ross and the clinic would benefit from Viola’s experience. Tom sat in shock before his senior partner’s desk, unable to find credible words of protest.