“We are on our honeymoon.”

“Valeria,” he said, with the particular weariness of a good man being burdened by a difficult wife, “don’t be so heartless.”

He came back nearly three hours later.

By then I had sent the dessert away untouched and gone up to the room and started, without quite admitting to myself what I was doing, to pack.

And I asked him the question I had been swallowing for months, the one I had never let myself say out loud.

“If you are never going to stop running to her,” I said, “why did you marry me?”