What strikes me, remembering it, is how calm I was.

I had imagined this hour for three weeks, and in my imagining it always carried a kind of electricity, a trembling — the moment the wife finally strikes back.

When it actually arrived, there was none of that.

There was only a clean, quiet certainty, almost administrative, the feeling of a long checklist reaching its final item.

The liaison’s mistaken phone call was the last variable I had needed and could not have arranged, the one piece of timing no amount of planning could buy, and the universe had simply handed it to me at noon on the day the pieces were already in place.

I did not feel triumphant.