It was like being shot. Like being knocked down by an automobile. Like waking up to find that everything he’d thought of as himself had disappeared and nothing was left but a single want: to be with Chloe, Chloe, Chloe. There was no part of the weeks that followed that he could bear, now, to recollect: especially not discovering she was pregnant, or when, after Edward got back, she did what she needed to do to make sure that Edward could believe the baby was his. The months that followed had been so difficult that he couldn’t understand, then or now, how he’d survived them. He kept working, he stayed in the house, he acted around Edward’s father, around Edward and Chloe, as if nothing had changed. As if—Chloe had begged him to do this—he were simply an employee. He learned, then, how devious he could be. How smoothly he could say one thing and mean another, not a muscle twitching on his face.

The baby was born in May. Not long afterwards, Chloe came to his room late at night and told him she couldn’t live without him; she’d told Edward everything. Two days later, after scenes he’d managed to block almost completely from his memory, they left.

He booked a suite on the ship for “Mr. and Mrs. Durand and son Charles,” which was how they arrived in France. For several months they traveled to places where no one knew them, finally coming to rest at his relatives’ vineyard and winery in the Loire Valley. No one questioned him when he presented Chloe and baby Charles as his wife and son. They welcomed him into the business and helped him rent a house; they gave him the dogs that seemed to ratify his family as a family. Two years later, when he returned with that family to Crooked Lake, he told everyone that he and Chloe had married secretly in Doylestown, and that Charlie had been born there just before they all went to France.