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out the window as I struggled to pull in another breath. How odd, I thought dimly, that it’s exactly the same out there as it was a few minutes ago, right down to the police boat under the bridge. Those two imaginary cops still in the middle of that exact same imaginary conversation. It’s only in here that the landscape is unrecognizable.
    â€œRick, you can’t just go away and leave me no way to contact you. We have young children, responsibilities, a life. This is crazy. People don’t do this.” It was like something you’d read in the New York Post:
    â€œAT THE COPA, THEY FELL IN LOVE: Top Stockbroker Wife in Shock as Hubby Dumps Her for Barry Manilow.” But I had a New York Times life. I’d made sure of that. “ You can’t do this.”
    â€œLook,” he said, “that’s part of the point, the part where the doing this for you too aspect comes back in. You worry way too much. It’s neurotic and unhealthy for you, me, and the boys, this always thinking something is going to happen, that you’ll need to get hold of me in some imaginary emergency. I’m sick of living with it.”
    Some imaginary emergency . How dare he? “What’s the bottom line, as you bankers like to say?” I struggled to get hold of myself. “Do you see yourself coming back here, Rick? To our marriage, to us? Is this a new direction for your career or your life? God, who are you?”
    â€œLook, Cass—” He shrugged. “Why don’t we decide to take that as it comes?”
    â€œNo. You may be the new go-with-the-flow-unenslaved-by-the-tyranny-of-communications-devices, Rick, but I’m the same old lay-it-out-in-advance Cassie, and I need to know: Are you coming back to me?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Silence reverberated off of that, like neither of us could believe he’d said it.
    At least the cards were on the table now. “When are you going?”
    â€œTomorrow. Best to make a clean break, don’t you think?”
    â€œNo.” I stared at him and had a memory of myself pulling a Band-Aid off Jared’s elbow. It’ll hurt less if I do it quickly, sweetie . Who had I been kidding? It had still hurt like hell, it had just gotten the whole business over less painfully for me . And now my husband was taking the Band-Aid approach to leaving me.
    Somehow the whole aura of premeditation that was permeating this scene made it feel more agonizing. “So you’ve been planning this. Going on normally, knowing all the while that you were coming home to do this tonight?”
    He met my gaze. “I had to take my life back, Cass, and you wouldn’t have understood. You’d have tried to talk me out of it.”
    â€œSounds like that could have been your salvation.”
    â€œI understand you’re not interested in discussing it rationally,” he said.
    Damned right. “Can I stop you?” I asked. “Is there anything?” In retrospect I’m not proud of that, but at the moment I was desperate. My marriage, my world, was collapsing in front of me, and I’d never even seen it coming. I just desperately wanted to hold on to it and its familiar aura of stability and security.
    He shook his head.
    â€œSo,” I said. “When and how are you planning to talk to the kids? Assuming you are planning to.”
    He looked offended. “Are you implying that I’d take off on them, Cass?”
    â€œSeems to me that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
    â€œDon’t worry, I’ll talk to them. And, Cass?” He leaned in closer, putting his other hand over mine to draw me toward him. “Let’s spend this last night together.”
    â€œRick”—I pulled my hand away—“do you mean have sex with you?”
    â€œI’d like to feel a bond with you tonight,” he said, very seriously.
    I hoped whoever was writing the Manilow script was