TO MY HUSBAND I said nothing about either my trance or my night without sleep. Not that I was hiding them from him. It just seemed to me that there was no point in telling him. What good would it have done? And besides, I had simply missed a night’s sleep. That much happens to everyone now and then.

I made my husband his usual cup of coffee and gave my son a glass of warm milk. My husband ate toast, and my son ate a bowl of cornflakes. My husband skimmed the morning paper, and my son hummed a new song he had learned in school. The two of them got into the Sentra and left. “Be careful,” I said to my husband. “Don’t worry,” he answered. The two of them waved. A typical morning.

After they were gone, I sat on the sofa and thought about how to spend the rest of the day. What should I do? What did I have to do? I went to the kitchen to inspect the contents of the refrigerator. I could get by without shopping. We had bread, milk, and eggs, and there was meat in the freezer. Plenty of vegetables, too. Everything I’d need through tomorrow’s lunch.

I had business at the bank, but it was nothing I absolutely had to take care of immediately. Letting it go a day longer wouldn’t hurt.

I went back to the sofa and started reading the rest of Anna Karenina. Until that reading, I hadn’t realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized virtually nothing—the characters, the scenes, nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new book. How strange. I must have been deeply moved at the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away and vanished.

What, then, of the enormous fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that meant?

I stopped reading and thought about that for a while. None of it made sense to me, though, and soon I even lost track of what I was thinking about. I caught myself staring at the tree that stood outside the window. I shook my head and went back to the book.

Just after the middle of Volume 3, I found a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck between the pages. I must have been eating chocolate as I read the novel when I was in high school. I used to like to eat and read. Come to think of it, I hadn’t touched chocolate since my marriage. My husband doesn’t like me to eat sweets, and we almost never give them to our son. We don’t usually keep that kind of thing around the house.

As I looked at the whitened flakes of chocolate from over a decade ago, I felt a tremendous urge to have the real thing. I wanted to eat chocolate while reading Anna Karenina, the way I did back then. I couldn’t bear to be denied it for another moment. Every cell in my body seemed to be panting with this hunger for chocolate.