Again, yet again, he revisited that April evening. He had come home from work hoping, naïvely—stupidly he eventually saw it—to find something settled, or peaceful, or at the very least neutral or suspended, between the two of them. He had told Costanza the truth finally, and he had done what she asked. He had gone to see Andrew, and he had spoken to Justin by phone. He was so weary and so hungry that he even hoped to find one of her tasty dinners waiting for him in the kitchen. He had even—more naïvely still—allowed himself to hope that Costanza might by then have turned her attention to the remainder of the cycle, whose importance ought to have supplanted everything else.

What he found instead was a quiet, dark apartment. Costanza was not in the bedroom. Her clothes were gone. In the library her desk was cleared. In the kitchen, on the table, was a note:

I thought I knew you. Then I learned that I did not. I thought I knew myself. I now know I have a lot more to learn.

If I start to speak about the drugs, the drink, my mind, the way my emotions were stirred by everything that I discovered in the middle of that brutal night, I’ll try to explain myself, and I can’t do that, not now.

Nor can I see you right now, or speak to you. I have to go away. Please don’t come find me. Please.

Henry tried her cell, then Andrew’s. Neither picked up. He went downtown to her apartment in the East Village—no answer. He phoned Justin, who said he had seen Andrew and described him as struggling, but Andrew had left earlier that morning and did not say where he was going.

Henry raced up to the Upper West Side, to Judith’s. Her doorman told him to go upstairs. The door to the apartment stood open. He stepped through it and followed the scent of coffee down a long hall to the rear, where he found Judith in the kitchen, sitting at a round wooden table with a steaming mug in front of her. She was staring out over the rooftops.

“Sit, Henry.” She calmly sipped from the mug. It was as if she were tasting those words the way she was tasting her coffee. Savoring it. Savoring the command, the tilt in her favor, for once after all these years, the knowledge she had of what had happened, because she knew, it was stamped all over her. He knew her well, too well still.

Yet her face did not seem at all calm, once he really looked into it. Instead it was rigid with upset: a mirror of what he expected his looked like.

Henry dropped into the chair. “Do you know where they are?”

“Andrew,” Judith said slowly, “is staying over at his friend Kevin’s for a few days.”

“And Costanza?”