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Two weeks after B leaves, A receives her first email from him. In it, he describes the various people he has met abroad so far. He makes no explicit mention of lovers. But he devotes an entire page to recounting a group Scrabble game, with particular attention paid to the woman seated next to him. Ever since receiving the email (one a.m., perhaps a reasonable hour where he is), A has not left her laptop. She has already reread the letter several times. She is trying to understand what it means.

A met B only a month before he left. She knew from the outset that this trip was imminent. He had hidden nothing. My work will be sending me away soon, he had told her: Six weeks. And what about this, she had asked, referring to the bed in which they lay. No one else, he promised, if that is what you want. And she had said: You don’t have to do that for me.

It is difficult to tell, from this email, whether he has kept his promise. Instead of addressing the promise directly, he meticulously describes the Scrabble game, almost play-by-play. A could not care less about B’s Scrabble game. She wants to know whether he has met anyone else. He appears to have met this woman. Yet it is difficult to tell, from B’s description, who she is, or what she means.

She’s just a colleague, B wrote, another American from the company, as well as the most aggravating Scrabble player he has ever encountered. She was the kind of player who contested every recherché two- or three-letter word on the board, B wrote. For instance, on one of B’s very first turns, he played jo horizontally, scoring a triple-letter on the j. Since he had set the j atop a vertical word—ape, forming jape—he scored a second tripleletter. The o, too, was a vertical addition: he’d placed it on bi, forming obi. The play was worth more than fifty points. But the woman—this woman—challenged all three of B’s words. She had never heard of any of them, she scoffed, B wrote. She challenged jape, so he looked it up (they hadn’t brought a dictionary; he had to search Hasbro.com’s Scrabble page on his smart phone). Jape: to joke or quip, to make sport of. She challenged jo, so he looked it up: an Irish term of endearment, a sweetheart. She challenged obi, so he looked it up: an alternative spelling of obeah, a religious system of African origin, involving witchcraft and sorcery. The whole ordeal lasted fifteen minutes, B wrote. The reception at the compound was capricious, so the Hasbro website kept lagging. At one point B even had to hold his phone above his head—squinting to see the 4G signal’s ziggurat of blue bars—until finally obi’s page had loaded. In the end, of course, the woman’s challenges came to nothing. But because it was a friendly game, informal, no one made her forfeit her turn.