“That job of yours,” she said. “All those crazy people. The criminals. It must be hard.”

She fell silent for a while. Her body was tight against mine. We were moving toward a deeper, more convulsive rhythm.

I pulled up and glanced down into her face. She wrapped her legs around my haunches. Then suddenly, she laughed. It was a deep laugh, from a deep place, sleepy and provocative. She was in some ways a reckless woman.

I pulled away.

Out the window, there were low clouds coming down the hill. White clouds, fog really, and before too long that fog would come rushing down. The wind had already begun to nag at the rooftops. I was familiar with that nagging breeze—it hounded my house, mine and Elizabeth's, on the other side of the point, over in Golden Hinde.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing. Let’s slow things down. Make the time last.”

The room held a vivid luminosity. The curtains, Sara's toes, her blouse draped over the chair—all were etched with light, an aura not unlike that which precedes certain types of seizures. It was often there for me at such moments, like the glow of the sun after it slips over the edge of the world. Entranced, though, lost in the moment, I sometimes did not recognize its presence until afterwards, in memory, so I cannot be sure even now, as I write this down, if it was there at all.

Sara rolled toward me. “We've been meeting like this for a while now,” she said.

“Not so long. A few weeks.”

“It wasn't what I had planned, you know. This kind of thing, with a married man. I have a boyfriend.”

“I know.”

“He wants to get serious with me.”

“You told me that, yes.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I have to go over to the Correctional Facility this afternoon.”

“That's not what I mean.”

She was astride me now, and I reached up to touch her breasts. She yawned. The drink catching up with her. It was a strong drink—I knew how to mix them—and she’d taken it down pretty fast. My tie hung over her neck, draped like a scarf.

“Your wife, Elizabeth, she knows, doesn't she?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She will. Sooner or later.”

I said nothing.

“So, what are you going to do?  About us?”

Maybe that was the trigger. Sara's question. The anxiety it produced. I was confused, torn between two women. I still loved my wife. Or maybe it was simply something gone wrong in the soft mass of the brain. Something induced by the way she moved, eyes closed, straddling me—a kind of sleepy, drowsy, circling motion, as if she were slipping into a vortex and I was at its center. She didn’t speak. Her head slumped and rolled back a little.