She had plans, she calibrated certain strategies, she was a professional woman and no fool, despite her fading golden looks and her soft-spoken manner. She would sink herself for the next ten months in the very pettiness of her work: preparing lessons, correcting student papers (in such fastidious detail everyone would marvel at her idealism), teaching to the best of her abilities, attending meetings, being congenial—but not too eagerly congenial—to her colleagues. To reward herself she would turn her attentions on the house. Scouring sinks and tubs, caulking, varnishing, painting, buying curtains, gay-striped blinds, cushions, pillows. . . . Though her husband had contemptuously given all the furniture to her Monica had been able to furnish only a few rooms of this large house, so there were months ahead, absorbing, self-indulgent months, of browsing through secondhand furniture shops in the country, searching for bargains. She would buy old lamps, old clocks, umbrella stands, antique books . . . she would prop herself up in bed and read novels by authors whose names were long forgotten, romances of the Brandywine and the Delaware valleys, books whose covers were falling off and whose pages were yellowed. . . . A second marriage, Monica thought. Of sorts.

Time had pleated so queerly, swallowing up eight years of her life. But now it would expand. Now clocks would tick with less urgency. She would never again think of injuring herself, blaming herself, loathing herself. She would never again lie in rumpled sheets smelling of her own sweat and misery, thinking, How have I failed, what have I done wrong, what are the flaws in my character. . . .

“But why think of the past? Where is the past?” Monica said aloud, suddenly angry. She reveled in the sound of her own voice when it was angry. When no one else was a witness.

2

One afternoon in early October Monica was leaning in the doorway at the rear of the house when she happened to notice a horse and rider appear at the edge of a woods some distance away. A man or a woman?—she squinted but couldn’t be sure. It was a warm day, the sunshine blazed. The air was loud with insects. Monica waited for another rider to appear behind the first—she’d seen as many as five or six riders on that lane—and when no one else came along, and the rider turned in her direction, she felt a clutch of fear.

It wasn’t fear, precisely. It must have been simple alertness, apprehension. She didn’t want anyone intruding on her privacy.