The rooms they lived in at the Westmeyer Hotel were nice—not honeymoon-suite nice, or Teresa’s idea of what that would be, but the walls were white and clean and the furniture matched, and even though they were rooms relegated to employees and their families, there was housekeeping and discount room-service meals, and during the time they lived there Teresa’s life came close to how she imagined rich people lived; now she thinks it was simply that she hadn’t felt poor. She suspects that the note Dermot wrote her when he left was not as elaborate or as elegant as the one he wrote for the hotel management. (Unlike her, they seemed to have understood completely why their evening desk clerk was suddenly gone, understood why it would take her two weeks—till the end of the month, they emphasized—to find a new place to live.) His note for her, written on Westmeyer stationery, sealed in a Westmeyer envelope, and left under a reading lamp on one of the nightstands, read simply: T, please don’t take this personally. I’m just not cut out for it. That, and a postscript: I’ll call you. He never called her at the hotel, nor has he called the new number, listed in the D.C. phonebook under her married name. At first, she came home each day from the job she’d managed to get back (after quitting it to be a wife and a mother) and asked Becky if there’d been any calls. The girl always seemed to say “nope” a little too quickly and unsympathetically, seemed to know that Teresa was asking about the absent Mr. Ragazzino, and Teresa caught herself wondering whether Dermot had left her for another woman, and wondering if that other woman might be Becky. The lunacy of this thought made her afraid she was going crazy, so she stopped asking.

Mr. Hardy, who was a manager in the claims department at the auto insurance company where she worked, told her one day that she was doing a fine job. “Honestly,” he said, “if it were up to me, you’d get a big fat raise.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hardy.”