I can’t stand this any longer. I cannot sit next to Wilder, repeatedly glancing at my damn mobile under the table, waiting for Nurse Marion to send me her nightly status report on Henri’s pneumonia, kidneys, and fever. Every evening she announces his temperature; every evening she tells me if his position on the margins of life has changed. It hasn’t so far. But she’s three-quarters of an hour late today. What if Henri’s dead?

As I dash down the stairs from the third floor and race through the entrance hall of the Kensington town house, I hear Wilder calling down to me over the clatter of my heels on the black-and-white tiles.

“Eddie?”

I heave open the heavy eight-foot-high wooden door and, with a deep breath, suck London’s cool, roaring, fume-filled, rain-soaked air into my lungs.

Wilder doesn’t deserve any of this. Not my lies or the fact that I get drunk when I’m with him to forget another man for a few hours. He should never be any woman’s second choice, and yet I wish that he’d take me in his arms so I might confess everything at last. Still, it has only been forty days: some women have affairs that last for years. I’ve no idea how they manage, but obviously they do.

Help me, Wilder. No, I can’t expect that of him. Briefly I rest my finger on the host’s doorbell. I can’t see the camera, but I know it’s peering out from behind the black glass ball next to the buzzer, and that upstairs Wilder can see me.

I hear the crackle of Wilder’s voice over the interphone. “What’s going on, Eddie?”

“I . . .”

I should let you go, but I can’t because I need your arms around me at night. I need you as my lover so I can cope with Henri. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I love you and yet I don’t love you.

My feelings for Wilder used to be clear and pure. A fresh start, a different man, new emotions unlike those I had had for Henri. Not as fiery, not as confusing. Just good feelings. Honest feelings.

But then Henri came back—more or less. Rather less, but still more than ever before. All of a sudden, those two sets of emotions were in conflict. Two kinds, two colors, two weight categories. Or were they?

“Edwina?”

“Wilder.”

Good old Wilder. How much I love being with you. How deeply I am caught up with Henri. You do know I was never a woman for two men?

“Would you like me to come with you?” he asks.