Peter shrugged. “We were talking about this party, about you, come to think of it. About you going away. Velan said something about the possibility of one of you meeting someone else, the kind of cutting remark you’d expect, the kind I’ve come to expect, anyway. You don’t know how awful he can be. No one does. Everyone thinks he’s such a joy to live with, so delightful.”

Desmond had fallen for this trap before, leaping at the chance to tell a friend—at last—what he really thought of his partner at the first signs of trouble and then discovering a week later that his words had been repeated during a passionate reconciliation, thereby killing two friendships with one truth. “No one’s delightful all the time,” he said.

“We got talking about fidelity. Velan started going on and on about it, as if there was something bothering him, something he wanted to tell me or ask me. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I just asked him outright.”

Peter stopped here, at what seemed like the most crucial point. “If he was seeing someone else?” Desmond prompted.

Peter let his hands hang between his knees. The backs of his hands and his fingers up to the second knuckles were covered in graying hair. Age, Desmond thought, was so unkind. Peter looked at him with a blank expression. “I asked him if he knew I’ve been having an affair.”

“You?”

“For the past six months.”

“Wow! Six months?” It shocked him to think that steady, reliable Peter had been carrying on behind Velan’s back, but there was something undeniably impressive about the fact that he’d been able to keep it secret for so long. “That’s quite a fling.”

Peter looked out the window and started to rub his throat. “I think it may be more than a fling,” he said. When he looked at Desmond again, he had a pleading expression in his eyes, as if, having made this confession of real emotion, he deserved understanding and sympathy. Who wouldn’t understand cheating on poor impossible Velan? Desmond tried his best to nod sympathetically, but he found a curious kind of uneasiness and perhaps jealousy nipping at him, the way he’d felt last month when he went to Chicago to visit his father and learned that the woman sitting next to him on the plane had paid less than half of what he’d paid for his ticket. He looked away from Peter’s hands, figuring he’d misread the tawdry hairiness of them a moment earlier; virility, not age.

“But, Peter,” he said, “how did you think Velan was going to react?”

Peter squinted, pondering the question. “I don’t know. Maybe I imagined that after being faithful to him all these years, I’d have a little room to wriggle.”