I don’t want to do a fourth.”

And then he came around the counter and put his arms around me and we stood in the kitchen for a long time, and he said, into my hair, “It’s just us then.

That’s all right.

That was always the good part anyway.”

I have thought about that afternoon roughly once a week for four years.

Because it was, I am almost certain, entirely sincere.

I do not believe he was performing.