Meanwhile, Barbara and I had stopped texting. I’d begun to think that success was just an obsession. Couples must succeed! They only succeed if you put in the work! What a bourgeois crock of shit, the couple as a business venture, where every day you roll up the shutter door, then roll up your sleeves. I was resting my affective calves, like Giò had rested her muscles and nerves after quitting her job working with refugees, letting herself get wrapped up in the sweet uselessness of a comedy hour.

I liked thinking that Barbara influenced Daniela. I enjoyed watching Daniela come home at night, like a secret message from my wife. “Look at me, stupid, here I am, an independent woman, you’d never think this was your sister-in-law, would you? She can do it, you know. She’s not here to make you a peanut butter and jelly—she’s not here to seduce you like some concubine. You see my imprint on her?”

Then this dream became my nightmare: I worried that Barbara had found, in Leone, her elusive balance, had found that celebrated empathy, true partnership, as though, with that article of hers, poor Gioia Longo had gotten exactly what she was trying to exorcise, what I was trying to exorcise: Leone and Barbara, together, this decree I’d hoped I’d never hear and yet there I was, forcing myself to fuel it. Best-selling Leone; countercultural yet popular Leone; at “my” home (my father’s home, Barbara’s home), Leone; with her, “my” wife.

One day, while I was settling into my puddle of free time, I got an email from Irene’s travel agency, with a train ticket to Milan.

She took me out to dinner with our friend, Francesca’s partner, the “cuckold,” in a Peruvian restaurant out past Centrale Station. [I still don’t have the courage to give this friend a name, or describe him, because once a week, Francesca continues to sleep with my sister, and now that I’m living in Milan, we often have breakfast together. I couldn’t publish this novel as is—I should change every detail, so revise it one more time, from the very beginning, but I love that everything’s been saved. Could I preserve the fullness of my life if I modified these compromising details that I’d scattered throughout the book? Maybe yes, maybe the enzyme of fiction allows for this: first confess, then conceal.]