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life? Someone he went to and said, “You can’t believe how bad things are at home....”
    She saw Phil enter through the kitchen, toss his briefcase and laptop on the breakfast bar and wander through the house, looking for her. It was the first thing he did every night unless she was standing in the kitchen.
    Eventually he found his way to the deck just as she was exhaling a long stream of cigarette smoke. Her first cigarette in twelve years. He stood in the doorway, noted the drink and cigarette and said, “Jesus Christ, did someone die?”
    “You had an affair,” she said evenly.
    He took a panicked step toward her, his face in a frozen state of shock, and after making a partial recovery said, “I’d better get a drink and a jacket.” He turned to go back into the house.
    So. He had. If he hadn’t he would have said, “What? What the hell are you talking about?” And all she could think was that the son of a bitch was still good-looking, maybe better looking than he had been at twenty-eight. Fifty-three now, still sporting a full head of that thick rich brown hair, now delicately threaded with gray at the temples. His face was just mildly lined but not so much from age as from the sun on the golf course. Then there were those teeth, beautiful and strong. He was not yet seeing the periodontist but she was. Up till today, she’d been happy for him about that. And he’d managed to stay fit, maybe the slightest paunch, graying chest hair, but he was tall and solid. Strong. She hated him so much.
    He came back outside with his own drink, wearing his weekend jacket over his shirt and loosened tie. “Lay it on me, Gerri. What’s going on?”
    “You had an affair. I just found out.”
    “And where’d you hear that?”
    “Never mind. Just tell me. And start with the truth because you don’t know how much I know.”
    He took a deep breath and a drink from his glass. Then he said, “I had an affair. Years ago. I’m sorry. It’s been completely in the past for a long, long time. I’m sorry,” he said again. “It wasn’t your fault—it was my fault. My failing, my inadequacy. You can’t imagine how much I regret it.”
    “You had an affair, ” she said again, blown away by his admission. “I need you to tell me about it. The truth about it. When it started, who it was, when it ended. And most important, why! ”
    He leaned back in his chair. “The why might be impossible—I’ve asked myself a hundred times. Years ago, years ago, there was an attractive woman in the office. We worked together briefly and hit it off right away—she was very personable, funny. I did the one thing I thought I’d never do— Not only was it straying from my marriage, which I’d never even been tempted to do, but also it was a coworker, the potential for major-league sexual harassment. Defying all common sense, I made a pass. She responded to me. We had a couple of lunches, met for a drink a few times. She was single, lived alone and I made the mistake of going to her place one late afternoon and got carried away, knowing it was wrong, feeling like shit with guilt, but it got started. It ended almost six years ago. Nothing like that ever happened before, and it will never happen again.”
    Gerri did a quick mental calculation. Six years ago, while he was having an affair, the kids had been seven, ten and thirteen. She remembered that year and the preceding year—soccer, band, one starting middle school. Her mother had died of uterine cancer nine years ago, her father quickly following of prostate cancer. That had been a horrible time, but by six years ago things had leveled out emotionally. As far as she could remember, there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy going on. They hadn’t had a standoff about him buying a sailboat; none of the kids were sick or in trouble; she hadn’t yet been having the menopausal symptoms that rocked her stable world.
    “When did it start?” she demanded.
    He hung his head