And only when he stopped answering her entirely, when his body went quiet, did she at last pick up the phone and dial for the ambulance.

Something in me went very cold and very still hearing it.

He had not only betrayed me.

He had handed his one life to an affair, to a bag of illegal pills, and to a woman who, in the deciding moment, cared more about hiding what they’d done than whether he lived.

That was the detail I could not get past, and in a strange way it clarified everything else.

Set aside the affair for a moment; affairs are old and common and human.