On the one hand, she knows that she is reading too much into the email. But on the other hand, she knows that she can never read too much into B’s emails. In matters of love, they had both agreed, it is impossible to read too much into anything. This was one of the first conversations they had had together. Being in love, they had agreed in bed one night, meant being in a state of interpretive hysteria. Every detail was significant, polysemous, charged. That was why lovers had to be especially careful with one another, so as not to arouse suspicions. No literary critic in the world, B had claimed, was more vigilant than a suspicious lover. There was a kind of close-reading involved in cuckoldry. There was a whole hermeneutics of cuckoldry. The domestic space became alive with signs. If a wife came home at the wrong hour, in the wrong dress, by the wrong door, if she used a word she had never used before—the husband would notice. Where had she been? Who had taught her that word? If she started mentioning a colleague she had never mentioned, or stopped mentioning a colleague she used to always mention, or suddenly began rereading Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’: these were all signs. If she so much as put on Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata before dinner, that, too, constituted a sign. In each case the husband would ask himself: What does this mean? What was she trying to tell him?

So B would be expecting A to read into this email. He would have had that conversation in mind while writing it. When he mentioned the cell-phone coverage, the woman, their marriage—he would have known. When he neglected to mention the promise that they had made one another, he had to know that this omission would be more conspicuous—more charged with meaning—than the actual content of his letter. And it was likely for the same reason that he had not asked her about the promise. In deliberately refraining from asking whether she had met anyone, he was trying to tell her something.

The absence of this question is the worst aspect of the email by far. Why didn’t he ask? She doesn’t know what to make of it. The implications are endless. It is like a blank Scrabble tile that A has been given, a wall of inscrutable smooth beige, onto which she can project any meaning whatsoever. Depending on what value she assigns it, the question’s absence could mean (could be made to mean) any number of things: that B trusts her; that B wants her to think that he trusts her; that B respects her privacy and autonomy (or wants her to think he does); that B is incurious, indifferent, could not care less whether she is seeing anyone (or wants her to think that he is); that B is, on the contrary, overly curious, jealous even, obsessed with the prospect of her seeing someone, but dreads ever actually asking her; or, finally, that B is simply delimiting the perimeter of their discourse, since by neglecting to ask A this question, he is as good as saying to her, ‘Never ask me this question,’ ‘We are not allowed to ask each other this question,’ ‘This question is banned from play.’