I had rehearsed a great deal in the car and none of it was any use, so what came out was, “Why did you leave her at the doors?”

Claire Ashford looked at me for a while.

“Because I’m the woman who was sleeping with her husband,” she said. “And I was standing in her kitchen.”

Alan pulled a chair over and sat down and, without asking, so did I. That is how the three of us ended up talking for two hours and ten minutes in a laundromat on Route 6 with one dryer running the whole time, belonging to nobody.

Here is what she told me.

She and Daniel started three years ago. She knew he was married; she is not asking anyone to think better of her about that. He told her the marriage had ended in every way but paperwork. He told her that Emily was fragile and that leaving had to be managed carefully or it would destroy her. He said the word *fragile* so often that Claire had built a whole person out of it, and the person she had built was not the woman who eventually parked outside her apartment building and sat there for forty minutes without getting out.