“Good morning, Walter.”

“Good morning,” he said with a shudder at her nice morning smell. He walked on through the kitchen and up the back staircase to the little room where the love of his life was still in her flannel pajamas, ensconced in a nest of bedding on her sofa, holding a mug of creamed coffee, and watching some sports-channel roundup of the NCAA basketball tournament. The smile she gave him-a smile that was like the last flash of the familiar sun he’d lost-turned to horror when she saw what he was holding.

“Oh, shit,” she said, turning off the television. “Oh, shit, Walter. Oh, oh, oh.” She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

He closed the door behind him and slid down with his back against it until he was sitting on the floor. Patty drew breath, and then drew more breath, and more breath, and didn’t speak. The light in the windows was unearthly. Walter shuddered again, his molars clicking as he sought to control himself.

“I don’t know where you got that,” Patty said. “But it was not for you. I gave it to Richard last night to get him away from me. I wanted him out of our life! I was trying to get rid of him, Walter. I don’t know why he did that! It’s so horrible that he did that!”

From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying.

“I never meant you to read that,” she said in a keening high voice. “I swear to God, Walter. I swear to God. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve this.”

She cried for some long while then, some ten or a hundred minutes. All regular Sunday-morning programming was suspended for the emergency, the day’s normal course so thoroughly obliterated that he couldn’t even feel nostalgia for it. As chance would have things, the spot on the floor directly in front of him had been the scene of a different kind of emergency just three nights earlier, a benign emergency, a pleasurably traumatic coupling that in hindsight now looked like a harbinger of this malignant emergency. He’d come upstairs late on Thursday evening and attacked Patty sexually. Had performed, with her surprised consent, the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist’s: had yanked off her black work pants, pushed her to the floor, and rammed his way inside her. If it had ever occurred to him to do this in the past, he wouldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t forget that she’d been raped as a girl. But the day had been so long and disorienting-his near-infidelity with Lalitha so inflaming, the roadblock in Wyoming County so infuriating, the humility in Joey’s voice on the telephone so unprecedented and gratifying-that Patty had suddenly seemed, when he walked into her room, like his object. His obstinate object, his frustrating wife. And he was sick of it, sick of all the reasoning and understanding, and so he threw her on the floor and fucked her like a brute. The look of discovery on her face then, which must have mirrored the look on his own face, made him stop almost as soon as they’d got started. Stop and pull out and straddle her chest and stick his erection, which seemed twice its usual size, into her face. To show her who he was becoming. They were both smiling like crazy. And then he was back inside her, and instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement she was giving forth loud screams, and this inflamed him all the more; and the next morning, when he went down to the office, he could tell from Lalitha’s chilly silence that the screaming had filled the whole large house. Something had begun on Thursday night, he hadn’t been sure what. But now her manuscript had shown him what. The end was what. She’d never really loved him. She’d wanted what his evil friend had. The whole thing now made him glad he hadn’t broken the promise he’d given Joey at dinner in Alexandria the following night, the promise that he not tell anybody, but especially not tell Patty, that he’d married Connie Monaghan. This secret, as well as several other more alarming ones that Joey had vouchsafed, had been weighing on Walter all weekend, all through the long meeting and the concert the day before. He’d been feeling bad about keeping Patty in the dark about the marriage, feeling as if he were betraying her. But now he could see that, as betrayals went, this one was laughably small. Cryably small.

“Is Richard still in the house?” she said finally, wiping her face with a bedsheet.

“No. I heard him go out before I got up. I don’t think he’s come back.”

“Well, thank goodness for small mercies.”

How he loved her voice! It murdered him to hear it now.

“Did you guys fuck last night?” he said. “I heard talking in the kitchen.”

His own voice was harsh like a crow’s, and Patty took a deep breath, as if settling in for prolonged abuse. “No,” she said. “We talked and then I went to bed. I told you, it’s over. There was a little problem years ago, but it is over.”

“Mistakes were made.”

“You have to believe me, Walter. It is really, really over.”

“Except I don’t do for you physically what my best friend does. Never did, apparently. And never will.”

“Ohhh,” she said, closing her eyes prayerfully, “please don’t quote me. Call me a whore, call me the nightmare of your life, but please try not to quote me. Have that little bit of mercy, if you can.”

“He may suck at chess, but he’s definitely winning at the other game.”

“OK,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. “You’re going to quote me. OK. Quote me. Go ahead. Do what you have to do. I know I don’t deserve mercy. Just please know that it’s the worst thing you can do.”

“Sorry. I thought you liked talking about him. In fact, I thought that was the main point of interest in talking to me.”

“You’re right. It was. I won’t lie to you. It was, for about three months. But that was twenty-five years ago, before I fell in love with you and made a life with you.”

“And what a satisfying life that’s been. ‘Nothing so wrong with it,’ I believe your phrase was. Although the facts on the ground would appear to suggest otherwise.”

She grimaced, her eyes still shut. “Maybe you want to just read through the whole thing now and pick out all the worst lines. Do you want to just do that and get it over with?”

“Actually, what I want to do is stuff it down your throat. I want to see you fucking gag on it.”

“OK. You can do that. It would sort of be a relief from what I’m feeling now.”

He’d been clutching the manuscript so hard that his hand was cramped. He released it and let it slide between his legs. “I don’t actually have anything else to say,” he said. “I think we’ve pretty much covered the main points.”

She nodded. “Good.”

“Except I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to be in the same room with you again. I don’t want to hear that person’s name again. I don’t want to have anything to do with either of you. Ever. I just want to be alone so I can contemplate having wasted my entire life loving you.”

“Yes, OK,” she said, nodding again. “But also no? No, I don’t agree to that.”

“I don’t care if you agree.”

“I know you don’t. But listen to me.” She sniffed hard, composing herself, and set her mug of coffee on the floor. Her tears had softened her eyes and reddened her lips and made her very pretty, if you cared about her prettiness, which Walter no longer did. “I never intended you to read that,” she said.

“What the fuck is it doing in my house if you didn’t intend that?”

“You can believe me or not, but it’s the truth. It was just a thing I had to write for myself, to try to get better. It was a therapy project, Walter. I gave it to Richard last night to try to explain why I stayed with you. Always stayed with you. Still want to stay with you. I know there’s stuff in there that must be horrible for you to read, I can hardly even imagine how horrible, but that’s not all there is in it. I wrote it when I was depressed, and it’s full of all the bad things I was feeling. But I’ve finally been starting to feel better. Especially after what happened the other night-I was feeling better! Like we were finally having some kind of breakthrough! Isn’t that how you felt, too?”