“You guys got along OK?” Walter asked.

“It was a little awkward. I was glad when he left. I had to drink a big glass of sherry the one night he was here.”

“That’s not so bad. One glass.”

Part of the deal she’d struck with herself was to tell Walter no lies, not even tiny ones; to speak no words that couldn’t narrowly be construed as truth.

“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

In bed with him that night, she took off her pajamas and was relieved to find she wanted him more, not less, for what she’d done. It was fine, having sex with him. There was nothing so wrong with it.

“We need to do this more,” she said.

“Any time. Literally any time.”

They had a sort of second honeymoon that summer, fueled by her contrition and sexual botheration. She tried hard to be a good wife, and to please her very good husband, but a full accounting of the success of her efforts must include the e-mails that she and Richard began to exchange within days of his departure, and the permission she somehow gave him, a few weeks after that, to get on a plane to Minneapolis and go up to Nameless Lake with her while Walter was hosting another V.I.P. trip in the Boundary Waters. She immediately deleted the e-mail with Richard’s flight information, as she’d deleted all the others, but not before memorizing the flight number and arrival time.

A week before the date, she repaired to the lake in solitude and gave herself entirely to her derangement. It consisted of getting stumbling drunk every evening, awakening later in panic and remorse and indecision, then sleeping through the morning, then reading novels in a suspended state of false calm, then jumping up and pacing for an hour or more in the vicinity of the telephone, trying to decide whether to call Richard and tell him not to come, and finally opening a bottle to make the whole thing go away for a few hours.

Slowly the remaining days ticked down toward zero. On the last night, she got vomiting drunk, fell asleep in the living room, and was jolted back to consciousness at a predawn hour. To get her hands and her arms to stop shaking enough to dial Richard’s number, she had to lie down on the still-ungrouted kitchen floor.

She reached his voice mail. He had found a new, smaller apartment a few blocks from his old one. All she could picture of this new place was a larger version of the black room of the apartment he’d once shared with Walter, the apartment she’d displaced him from. She dialed again, and again got his voice mail. She dialed a third time, and Richard answered.

“Don’t come,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

He said nothing, but she could hear him breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why don’t you call me again in a couple of hours. See how you feel in the morning.”

“I’ve been throwing up. Been vomiting.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Please don’t come. I promise I’ll stop bothering you. I think I just needed to push it to the limit before I could see that I can’t do it.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It’s the right thing, isn’t it?”

“Probably. Yeah. It probably is.”

“I can’t do it to him.”

“Then good. I won’t come.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I’m just asking you not to.”

“I will do what you want.”

“No, God, listen to me. I’m asking you to do what I don’t want.”

Possibly, in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was rolling his eyes at this. But she knew that he wanted to see her, he was ready to take a plane in the morning, and the only way they could agree definitively that he shouldn’t come was to prolong the conversation for two hours, going around and around, performing the unresolvable conflict, until they both felt so dirtied and exhausted and sick of themselves and sick of each other that the prospect of getting together became genuinely unappetizing.

Not least among the ingredients of Patty’s misery, when they finally hung up, was her sense of wasting Richard’s love. She knew him to be a man supremely irritated by female bullshit, and the fact that he’d put up with two nonstop hours of hers, which was about 119 minutes more than he was constituted to put up with, filled her with gratitude and sorrow about the waste, the waste. The waste of his love.

Which led her-it almost goes without saying-to call him again twenty minutes later and drag him through a somewhat shorter but even more wretched version of the first call. It was a small preview of what she later did in a more extended way with Walter in Washington: the harder she worked to exhaust his patience, the more patience he showed, and the more patience he showed, the harder it was to let go of him. Fortunately Richard’s patience with her, unlike Walter’s, was nowhere close to infinite. He finally just hung up on her, and he didn’t answer when she called yet again, an hour later, shortly before the time she figured he had to leave for Newark Airport to catch his flight.

Despite having hardly slept, and despite having thrown up what little she’d eaten the day before, she felt immediately fresher and clearer and more energetic. She cleaned the house, read half of a Joseph Conrad novel Walter had recommended, and didn’t buy any more wine. When Walter came back from the Boundary Waters, she cooked a beautiful dinner and threw her arms around his neck and-a rarity-made him actually squirm a little with the intensity of her affection.

What she should have done then was find a job or go back to school or become a volunteer. But there always seemed to be something in the way. There was the possibility that Joey would relent and move back home for his senior year. There was the house and garden she’d neglected in her year of drunkenness and depression. There was her cherished freedom to go up to Nameless Lake for weeks at a time whenever she felt like it. There was a more general freedom that she could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of. There was Parents’ Weekend at Jessica’s college in Philadelphia, which Walter couldn’t attend but was delighted that Patty showed an interest in attending, since he sometimes worried that she and Jessica weren’t close enough. And then there were the weeks leading up to that Parents’ Weekend, weeks of e-mails to and from Richard, weeks of imagining the Philadelphia hotel room in which they were going to spend one day and one night off the radar. And then there were the months of serious depression after Parents’ Weekend.

She’d flown to Philadelphia on a Thursday, in order to spend, as she carefully told Walter, an actual day on her own as a tourist. Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

Unbelievable as it may sound, she had not been alone at a hotel since her time in Room 21, and she was very impressed with her plushly mod room at the Sofitel. She examined all the amenities carefully while she waited for Richard to arrive, and then examined them again as the appointed hour came and went. She tried to watch television but could not. She was a pile of nervous pulp by the time the phone finally rang.

“Something’s come up,” Richard said.

“All right. OK. Something’s come up. OK.” She went to the window and looked at Philadelphia. “What was it? Somebody’s skirt?”

“Cute,” Richard said.

“Oh, just give me a little time,” she said, “and I’ll give you every cliché in the book. We haven’t even started on jealousy yet. This is, like, Minute One of jealousy.”