“How much time passed before he came to the inn again?” I finally ask.

“A week.”

“Did you know he would be coming back?”

“He didn’t say that first time, but I wanted him to come back. I missed him the minute he was gone. Each time he left I missed him more. By the sixth visit I knew I was in love with him. He seemed such an attentive, charming person. He knew how to coax my worries out and what to say to get me to laugh. Elliot had always been able to do this, too, but somehow with James, it was different. When he proposed after only three months, I said yes.”

“And you . . . felt loved by him?” I ask, because I can’t picture it. I can’t picture Martin kissing Belinda, making her laugh, making her feel wanted—all behaviors I believed him incapable of because of his crippling grief over losing Candace.

“I did,” Belinda says, but then a shadow seems to fall across her face. “In the beginning, anyway. But soon after we married I began to hope James would want a job that allowed him to be at home every night. I missed him when he was gone and wanted to believe he missed me. I thought the open road would loosen its hold on him, especially when I told him that I was expecting.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

Belinda shakes her head. “When I told him I wanted him to find a job closer to home, he said that he liked the job he had. There was nothing about our situation that needed fixing. He said I knew what he did for a living when I married him, and that I fell in love with him when he was living that kind of life. I’d been happy then. I could be happy now if I wanted to be. I was choosing to be unhappy about it.”

She pauses a moment, and I can see by the way she is staring down at her wedding band, plainer than mine, that Belinda was starting to see the cracks before she came to my house today. She came here to prove to herself the cracks were an illusion, that there were no cracks. But instead, her whole world has shattered.

“How did you know to come here?” I ask her gently. “How did you know the name Martin Hocking?”

She brushes away a couple of tears. “A few days ago when he was home, I saw an envelope half in and half out of his coat pocket. I pulled it out. It was addressed to a Martin Hocking at this address. The return address was from a bank here. I looked inside the pocket and saw another envelope addressed to this same man. James came into our bedroom as I was looking at them and he asked me what I was doing. I lied and told him I had wanted to launder his coat, because it was dirty from his travels, but that he had mail in the pocket.”