She offers him the card. Taking it, he pauses in the chilling snow and looks at it, saying nothing.

“Do you know him?” Mirabelle asks.

He hands the card back to her. “I know him.” And the conversation is over. But she had noticed something. When he was holding the card, he took his thumb and traced it over the name, and when he did so, he was powerfully distant from where he is now, in this snow with his daughter, in the woods in his backyard, in Vermont.

Her mother leaves the house to go babysit for her three-year-old grandchild. Mirabelle goes to her room after watching several hours of television with her now monosyllabic dad. The house is quiet, and she angles the shade on her bedside lamp and browses some of the books of her youth: Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Jane Eyre, The Little Princess, Secret Garden, The Happy Hollisters. Nancy Drew. Agatha Christie. Judy Blume: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Deenie. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. But something catches her ear. Something…the sound of a cat? Or an injured animal in the far distance. But her mind keeps recalculating the data, inching the source of the sound closer than the outdoors. This wail, these moans, are coming from inside the house. Wearing her bunny slippers – a gift last Christmas from an aunt who underestimated Mirabelle’s age by fifteen years – she opens the door to her room and steps out into the hall. She does not need to walk far to know that the sounds, which she has now identified as sobbing, are coming from her father, who is behind the closed door of his bedroom. She stands frozen like a deer with bunny feet, then guides the slippers backward into her room, noiselessly. She shuts her door without making a sound, as she had done one night twenty-one years ago after hearing the same cries coming from the same room.

The moaning has stopped, and now the house is quiet. Mirabelle sits in her armchair and sees her parka, which has tumbled off the foot of her bed and onto the floor. She retrieves Carter Dobbs’s business card. She approaches her parents’ bedroom and lays the tiny business card up against the doorway. Then she quietly slides her way back to her own room.

Six months pass unnoticed as Ray and Mirabelle live in a temporary and poorly constructed heaven, with him flying in and out, visiting her, taking her to fine restaurants, then back to his place, sometimes sleeping with her, sometimes not. Sometimes he takes her home and says good night. She does not like sex when she has her period. When she feels depressed, sex can sometimes leave her sullen, so during these times there is an awkward domesticity while they wait it out. He takes note of her use of expressions that linger from her adolescence – lazy bones, sleepyhead, early bird and is alternately amused and annoyed by them. A toothbrush is set aside for her. Since his house is closer to Neiman’s, she often stays the night with him, bringing an overlarge purse stuffed with a change of clothes so she can go directly to work from his house. When he fantasizes about sex, he thinks of her and no one else.

Ray shows up one day on Mirabelle’s message machine, saying he is in town and inviting her to an event in New York next month, and yes, she’ll need a dress so let’s go shopping. He takes her to Beverly Hills on one of her floating days off and they spend an erotic day shopping at Prada for something suitable. Ray glimpses her changing behind the flimsy screens, and when they get home, she tries on the dress, and then he fucks it right off her. Over the next several days, Mirabelle plans the trip, makes arrangements to get off work, and silently counts the days until takeoff.

RAY PORTER CAN’T BELIEVE HOW much she is crying, and he wishes he could take back what he has told her. But the letter is in her hand, just barely, and she looks away from it as she drops it onto the bed. She tilts her head down and sobs like a child. He had written the letter because he wanted to say it succinctly; he didn’t want to stammer or mollify it, he didn’t want to change direction in the middle of a sentence and retract what he was about to tell her because of a vulnerable look in her eye. But she wanted to know; she had asked to know and she seemed to have meant it. So he handed her the letter in person as they sat in his bedroom, at the beginning of the evening, which quickly came to a close hours before it normally would have.

Dear Mirabelle,

I suppose the only way to say it is to say it: I slept with someone. It was not romantic or intimate, and I did not stay the night with this person.

I am not telling you this to hurt you, and I’m not telling you because I want our relationship to change. I am telling you this only because you asked me to. I hope that you can find a place of understanding in you. I am sorry,

Ray

With Mirabelle turned away from him, he takes the letter and quickly slides it into a drawer so she won’t have to look at the tangible evidence of what he has done. The letter represents such an awful thing to her, and Ray does right by disappearing it.

He had debated with himself for two hours while flying to Los Angeles. Tell her, or not? But she had asked him to tell her. She must have meant it. Plus, it wasn’t love; it was a fuck. Plus, she had asked him to tell her. He thought this was a new feminism thing that he is honor bound to oblige; that if he doesn’t, he is a pig. That he will actually come off well by telling her; no one could judge him otherwise. But whatever his thought process was, whatever he told himself was the right thing to do, was false. Because his logic is not based in any understanding of her heart, and he continues to misread her.

Mirabelle doesn’t ask any questions. She rises up and drags her sweater down the hall, stumbling like a drunk. Ray does not know how to handle this girl. If only she were practical, he would handle her in a practical way, but Mirabelle is in stage one – a child who has just had her heart rearranged by someone she trusted. She mumbles a cancellation of their upcoming weekend trip to New York. He follows her to her car and watches her drive away. The next day, he gets on a plane to Seattle.

Ray waits a day, then phones her just at the moment he knows she will be walking through the door.

“How are you?”

“Okay,” she says in a small voice.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Okay. Can I call you back?”

“Yeah.”

And they hang up. Mirabelle lays down her things, takes off her diaphanous Gap windbreaker, and drinks some water. She has been in a daze all day. She never wants to talk to him again, yet she is glad he called. She needs to talk to a friend, an ally, about Ray’s transgression, but Ray is her only friend. She goes to her bedroom and dials area code 206.

“Ray?”

“Hang up and I’ll call you back,” he says.

“Yeah.”

This is a fiscal ritual. Whenever she calls him long distance, they hang up and he phones her back so she won’t have to pay for the call.

“Are you better?” he says.

“I’m a little better,” she says, not knowing what she means.

“Should we see each other?” says Ray.

“I don’t think so. I changed my ticket from New York. Is that okay? I want to go to Vermont to see my parents.”

Mirabelle is not going to her parents for comfort. There will be no sympathy from her mother or father, because she can hardly explain the situation to them, especially since her father is guilty of the same act. But there will be solace in her room, in her things.

“Sure. Of course,” says Ray.

The conversation stumbles on, and Ray tells her he is sorry he hurt her. And he is, but inside he doesn’t know what he could have done differently. He is determined not to love Mirabelle; she is not his peer. He knows that he is using her, but he isn’t able to stop. And as powerful as their desire for each other remains, their conflicting goals stalemate them, and their relationship has failed to move forward, even the incremental amount necessary for it to stay alive. They mumble some good-byes, Ray knowing it is not yet over, and with Mirabelle unable to think further than her own current pain.