“Horrid also. At least you don’t look it, the way I do.”

The rain had stopped in the night, giving way to a dense, south-smelling fog that was scarcely less wetting. Over breakfast, at a truck stop across the road, Walter told Lalitha about the e-mail from Dan Caperville at the Times.

“Do you want to go home now?” she said. “Do the press conference tomorrow morning?”

“I told Caperville I was doing it on Monday.”

“You could tell him you changed it. Just get it out of the way, so we’ll have the weekend free.”

But Walter was so painfully exhausted that he couldn’t imagine holding a press conference the next morning. He sat and suffered mutely while Lalitha, doing what he had lacked the courage to do the night before, read the Times article on her BlackBerry. “This is only twelve paragraphs,” she said. “Not so bad.”

“I guess that’s why everybody else missed it and I had to hear about it from my wife.”

“So you spoke to her last night.”

Lalitha seemed to mean something by this, but he was too tired to figure out what. “I just wonder who did the leaking,” he said. “And how much they leaked.”

“Maybe your wife leaked it.”

“Right.” He laughed and then saw the hard look on Lalitha’s face. “She wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he said. “She doesn’t care enough, if nothing else.”

“Hm.” Lalitha took a bite of pancake and looked around the diner with the same hard, unhappy expression. She, of course, had every reason to be sore at Patty, and at Walter, this morning. To feel rejected and alone. But these were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

“I just want to have our weekend meeting,” he said. “If I can just have two days to work on overpopulation, I can face anything on Monday.”

Lalitha finished her pancakes without speaking to him. Walter forced down some of his own breakfast as well, and they went out into the light-polluted dark morning. In the rental car, she adjusted the seat and mirrors, which he’d moved the night before. As she was reaching across herself to fasten her seat belt, he put an awkward hand on her neck and pulled her closer, bringing them eye to serious eye in the all-night roadside light.

“I can’t go five minutes without you on my side,” he said. “Not five minutes. Do you understand that?”

After a moment’s thought, she nodded. Then, letting go of the seat belt, she placed her hands on his shoulders, gave him a solemn kiss, and drew back to gauge its effect. He felt as if he’d done his utmost now and could go no further on his own. He simply waited while, with a child’s frown of concentration, she took his glasses off, set them on the dashboard, put her hands on his head, and touched her little nose to his. He was momentarily troubled by how similar her face and Patty’s looked in extreme close-up, but all he had to do was close his eyes and kiss her and she was pure Lalitha, her lips pillowy, her mouth peach-sweet, her blood-filled head warm beneath her silky hair. He struggled against how wrong it felt to kiss somebody so young. He could feel her youth as a kind of fragility in his hands, and he was relieved when she drew back again to look at him, with shining eyes. He felt that some word of acknowledgment was called for now, but he couldn’t stop staring at her, and she seemed to take this as an invitation to clamber across the gear shift and straddle him awkwardly on the bucket seat, so that he could take her fully in his arms. The aggression with which she kissed him then, the hungry abandon, brought him a joy so extreme that it blew up the ground beneath him. He was in free fall, everything he believed in was receding into darkness, and he began to cry.

“Oh, what is it?” she said.

“You have to go slow with me.”

“Slow, slow, yes,” she said, kissing his tears, wiping them with her satiny thumbs. “Walter, are you sad?”

“No, honey, the opposite.”

“Then let me love you.”

“OK. You can do that.”

“Really OK?”

“Yes,” he said, crying. “But we should probably hit the road.”

“In a minute.”

She put her tongue to his lips, and he opened them to let her in. There was more desire for him in her mouth than in Patty’s entire body. Her shoulders, as he gripped them through her nylon shell, seemed to be all bone and baby fat and no muscle, all eager pliability. She straightened her back and bore down on him, pushing her hips into his chest; and he wasn’t ready for it. He was closer now but still not fully there. His resistance the night before hadn’t been simply a matter of taboo or principle, and his tears weren’t all for joy.

Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance. Now that he’d driven her away, he keenly wanted her again, but he had a dim recollection, from the stories he’d heard and read about men in his position, that this was the terrible thing about them: that it was known as stringing a girl along. He sat for a while in the changeless purple-toned streetlight, listening to the trucks on the interstate.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m still trying to figure out how to live.”

“That’s OK. You can have some time.”

He nodded, taking note of the word some.

“Can I ask you one question, though?” she said.

“You can ask me a million questions.”

“Well, just one for now. Do you think you might love me?”

He smiled. “Yes, I definitely think that.”

“That’s all I need, then.” And she started the engine.

Somewhere above the fog, the sky was turning blue. Lalitha took the back roads out of Beckley at highly illegal speeds, and Walter was happy to gaze out the window and not think about what was happening to him, just inhabit the free fall. That the Appalachian hardwood forest was among the world’s most biodiverse temperate ecosystems, home to a variety of tree species and orchids and freshwater invertebrates whose bounty the high plains and sandy coasts could only envy, wasn’t readily apparent from the roads they were traveling. The land here had betrayed itself, its gnarly topography and wealth of extractable resources discouraging the egalitarianism of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, fostering instead the concentration of surface and mineral rights in the hands of the out-of-state wealthy, and consigning the poor natives and imported workers to the margins: to logging, to working in the mines, to scraping out pre- and then, later, post-industrial existences on scraps of leftover land which, stirred by the same urge to couple as had now gripped Walter and Lalitha, they’d overfilled with tightly spaced generations of too-large families. West Virginia was the nation’s own banana republic, its Congo, its Guyana, its Honduras. The roads were reasonably picturesque in summer, but now, with the leaves still down, you could see all the scabby rock-littered pastures, the spindly canopies of young second growth, the gouged hillsides and mining-damaged streams, the spavined barns and paintless houses, the trailer homes hip-deep in plastic and metallic trash, the torn-up dirt tracks leading nowhere.

Deeper in the country, the scenes were less discouraging. Remoteness brought the relief of no people: no people meant more everything else. Lalitha swerved violently around a grouse on the road, a grouse greeter, an avian goodwill ambassador inviting appreciation of the brawnier forestation and less marred heights and clearer streams of Wyoming County. Even the weather was brightening for them.