She picked up her mug, only to find herself gulping air. It was empty. She had to calm down. This man who knew nothing about her had managed to reach her, climbing along the vine of the internet cable. He’d bypassed her husband, Glen, and barged straight into the 150 square feet of her study.

Qiao Hongmei stood before the mirror, posing the way he’d described her, with her weight on one leg. She tried desperately to remember who’d been in the restaurant the night before, but not a single face remained in her mind. Yet he existed. A stranger’s existence, gradually taking on form and substance, a hint of bodily warmth, in their sixteenth-floor apartment with her unwitting husband in the next room.

Hongmei walked out of her study and into the kitchen, clutching her empty mug. She looked up suddenly to see Glen in a tracksuit. He was going for a jog, he said, and they could have breakfast together when he got back.

“All right,” she said. “Enjoy your run.”

His dark brown eyes lingered on her face.

“What is it?” she asked.

He said, “It’s good. You look very well.”

“You too,” she said.

Just as she was about to go back into her study, the door opened again and Glen thrust a FedEx package through the crack. She took the parcel, which felt like a couple of books. The best thing about Glen being a professor was his book purchases were tax-deductible; he got an order every couple of days. She tossed the package across the coffee table onto the couch, but it landed on the floor. Ignoring it, she went back into her study, then felt that wasn’t very nice of her, returned, and picked up the package. Her water sloshed onto Glen’s beloved Native American rug, its red dye apparently made from crushed bugs.

* * *

Back at her computer, she sipped her ice water. Twenty minutes later, his reply arrived. He said Hongmei probably wanted to know what he was like. He was five foot nine (not particularly tall), 185 pounds (just the way she liked it), with black hair and eyes. About himself: majored in English at Yale, got his master’s at Harvard, then dropped out after one year of working toward a PhD. The money his father left him was doing well in the hands of an investment broker. He and Hongmei were the same; they both found it hard to be faithful to a single person or profession. The instant he had set eyes on her, he had sighed that fidelity of the flesh was the easiest kind, and therefore the least important.