In her work, Milena had been untidy and disorganized, not writing down appointments, expenses or even formal agreements, operating on a private whim that, often, she had not even shared with Frances. But her personal emails were scarily well ordered, almost playfully businesslike in their arrangement of betrayal, jealousy and loss. The first thing I discovered, when I entered Milena’s virtual world, was that she had a special mailbox for her love affairs, labelled “Miscellaneous.” Johnny was in there, and so was a lover from the previous year, who had begun as a client. It struck me that she rarely called them by their name: it was never “Dear Johnny” or “Dear Craig.”

Gradually I came to feel a certain grudging, appalled admiration for the woman who’d taken my husband: she might have been predatory and cold, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. She didn’t say “make love” but “fuck”; she didn’t pretend to feelings she didn’t possess; she never used the word “love.” I was struck by the apparent absence of pleasure, the energetic joylessness of her affairs. And she’d had so many. How had she managed it? All that planning, all that deception, all the lies she must have told, different lies to different men and having to remember which version of herself she was meant to be with which man. It made me weary just to think of it.

I searched for Greg by name, but wasn’t discouraged when nothing turned up: if I’d learned anything over the past grim weeks, it was that their secret was buried deep. I wouldn’t stumble across it but would have to uncover it with patience and guile. I glanced at the mailboxes, one by one. Johnny, the client Craig, someone called Richard, with whom Johnny had overlapped and who had unceremoniously faded out. There was a mailbox labeled “Accounts,” which set my heart pounding so ferociously that I pressed my hand against my chest to calm it, feeling dizzy with the terror that I was finally about to enter the hidden world of my dead husband, but it turned out to be just what it said: increasingly exasperated messages from Milena and Hugo’s financial adviser about her accounts, which were clearly in a mess. There were also several people who didn’t sign off with their own names and whose addresses didn’t give any immediate clue as to their owners’ identity—perhaps, I thought, one might turn out to be Greg, masquerading under an assumed name. And then, of course, there were other people who hadn’t been given their own special compartment, but were scattered randomly through the in-box, or who had been moved to the catch-all “Personal” mailbox, which also held messages from friends, acquaintances and family.

“What are you doing?”