She looked around the coach and began to wonder what her fellow passengers would think of the nights she had just spent with Meiner. The two young women a few rows ahead, for instance. Checking their phones every few minutes, laughing and chatting too loudly, exchanging confessions and gossip for everyone to hear. They would look at her—at the thin skin of her wrists, at the outer corners of her eyes, at the thickness of her thighs—and they’d think she was over the hill, beyond sex. Truth to tell, she had no idea what young women thought today. She used to be more in touch. At one time, she believed she did know what was going on around her. Now she was uncertain. When had certainty abandoned her? She knew her own age group, yes. But two generations younger, what did they think—or think about? And what about her teenage grandchildren? There would be no room in their minds for considering a grandmother who’d had a six-night affair in her hotel room. They would be as unenlightened about her generation as she was about theirs.

She glanced at her imperfect outline reflected in the window and saw herself in her favourite wool cardigan, purchased decades ago in Edinburgh at the Scotland Shop. She was comfortable wearing this, a soft grey-blue, more blue than grey. Her face in the window seemed soft, too, her cheeks flushed. She thought of Meiner with true affection, and then she tried to think of nothing at all. She knew she had no answers for anything but history and grammar, the tools she needed for work. She unfastened her briefcase and opened her journal and propped it on the fold-out table. She wrote: I feel wickedly satisfied, powerful and good. I wanted the sex.

WITHIN A WEEK of returning home from Toronto, she resolved to make an effort to reconnect with friends. If Lew noticed a difference in her behaviour, he remained silent. Hazzley decided to invite four of their long-standing mutual friends, two couples, for lunch. Lew agreed to this, though she’d expected him to balk. Neither of them knew he would be dead within weeks.

“You’ll have to help me look presentable,” he said. “Iron a shirt, maybe? Take out the wrinkles?” He seemed to have renewed energy. Both felt the promise of festivity in the air.

Lew had always ironed his own shirts—since those early days of marriage, when he’d lugged home the ironing board—but Hazzley did the ironing that day without complaint. Lew chose a pale-blue shirt from his closet, no tie, something that would be loose and comfortable on his too-thin frame.

In the morning, he made a conspicuous effort. Rose early. Washed and shaved. Got himself into trousers and the blue shirt. Took some time to manage the buttons, all but the top one, which he left open. Sat on a chair; pulled on his socks, reached for his shoes. And in a wash of memory, suddenly began to talk about Hazzley polishing Sal’s soft leather shoes when Sal was a baby and beginning to take her first steps. “It was Sani-white . . . something like that,” Lew said. “Smelled a bit like chalk. Liquid in a small bottle. You shook it and put it on with a dauber, or should that be dabber? Little ankle-high shoes with laces. After you stroked the white polish over the surface, you set the shoes on the kitchen windowsill, up over the sink, to dry.”