Edith got up and started slowly undressing. She slept in his office; she had been doing that ever since he told her. She wished she could hate the girl and think of her as the one who stole a husband from his wife and a father from his children. But she didn’t, which actually was because she only thought of herself as they stood on that narrow, dusty, sunken road in the burning sunshine, staring out toward the long, high mountain range on the other side of the scorched desert, with its sparse, stunted olive trees. She felt overcome with deep disappointment and sadness; she was detached, she had taken this trip in vain, she had sought something that wasn’t meant for her. And then she had looked at her husband’s ecstatic face and thought: I don’t know him; he’s a stranger. It was just like when she was a girl and she ran after a man she thought was her father, weaving through the crowd, her heart pounding with glee and fright – only to discover that she was terribly mistaken. And when they returned from their trip, her love had died. That must be how it happened. Why else would she have taken it all so calmly? Because she did take it calmly, if you didn’t count that dangerous, brief period of the day after the children had gone to bed, and before he returned from his unknown pleasures. They discussed it calmly and agreed there was no need to hurry the divorce. No tears, no fighting, no hate. It seemed to her now that she had almost been expecting it.