“I mean, it seemed so normal here.” She was spreading cream cheese onto a bagel—breakfast for her, though it was nearly eight o’clock at night. “I guess I never even knew what normal was. It was just what an uptight Wellesley girl needed,” she explained.

Wolgast felt hopelessly outclassed, and told her so. She laughed brightly, with embarrassment, and quickly touched his hand. “You shouldn’t,” she said.

She worked long hours; seeing each other in any kind of customary way, going to restaurants or movies, was impossible. Wolgast was on disability and spent his days sitting around his apartment, feeling antsy; then he would drive to the hospital, and the two of them would eat dinner together in the cafeteria. She told him all about growing up in Boston, the daughter of college teachers, and about school, her friends and studies and a year she’d spent in France, trying to be a photographer. He got the idea she’d been waiting for somebody to come along in her life for whom all this would be new. He was wholly content to listen, to be that person.

They didn’t so much as hold hands until nearly a month had passed. They had just finished their dinner when Lila removed her glasses, leaned across the table, and kissed him, long and tenderly, her breath tasting of the orange she had just eaten.

“There,” she said. “Okay?” She looked around the room theatrically and lowered her voice. “I mean, I am, technically, your doctor.”

“My leg feels better already,” Wolgast said.

He was thirty-five, Lila thirty-one, when they married. A day in September: the ceremony was held on Cape Cod, at a small yacht club overlooking a tranquil bay of bobbing sailboats beneath a sky of crisp, autumnal blue. Nearly everybody who came was from Lila’s side of the family, which was huge, like some enormous tribe—so many aunts and uncles and cousins that Wolgast couldn’t keep count, couldn’t hope to keep everyone’s name straight. Half the women in attendance seemed to have been Lila’s roommates at one time or another, eager to tell him tales about various youthful escapades that seemed, in the end, to be all the same story. Wolgast had never been so happy. He drank too much champagne and stood on a chair to give a long, maudlin toast, utterly sincere, that ended with his singing, wincingly off-key, a verse from “Embraceable You.” Everyone laughed and applauded before sending them off under a corny torrent of rice. If anybody knew that Lila was four months pregnant, they didn’t say a word to him about it. Wolgast chalked this up to New England reserve, but then he realized that no one cared; everyone was honestly happy for them.