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for nine months, and knew even then there was nothing left for him. He would never go back. In retrospect, Sara realized those were the only details of his personal life he had ever given her.
    Occasionally he referred to Rondelais, the town in France in which he had grown up, and now and then he talked about his college days at Oxford. He had come to the United States shortly after graduation, and had lived here, on and off, the past twenty years. He told her she was marrying a poor man and a dreamer. She told him she didn’t care.
    There was a part of her that knew this was not the way adults entered into marriage. And there was the bigger part of her that didn’t care.
    In the delirium of the passion they both shared, neither of them talked much about their pasts. Sara had assumed they would have a lifetime to discover all of those details about each other.
    But in fact, they had only three weeks before Daniel lost control of his new sports car—her wedding gift to him—during an ice storm, and plowed into a tree. Only after his death did Sara realize she had been married to a man she didn’t even know.
    The nightmare of sorting out his affairs—such as they were—across two continents had been overwhelming, and without Dixie’s help Sara did not know how she would have navigated the mess. His publisher had put her in touch with a law firm in London that was apparently authorized to handle Daniel’s estate, however little of it there might be. Daniel was as free with his money as he was with his heart, and he had left very little behind. Nonetheless, the British lawyers kept writing, e-mailing, and telephoning to remind her that, according to French laws of succession, she was obligated to settle Daniel’s estate within a year. She managed to postpone the requests for a meeting until the most recent correspondence requested instructions as to how she wished to pay the taxes on Daniel’s property in Rondelais. She knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to go to France, sign whatever papers the lawyers wanted her to sign, liquidate whatever small acquisitions Daniel had managed to hold on to, and hope that would be enough to pay the French taxes, which she had heard were outrageous.
    And once that was done, the brief, glorious madness that had been her marriage to Daniel would be over, erased from time almost as surely as though it had never been. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go to France.
    It was that she didn’t want to say good-bye.

In the Land of Make-Believe

FOUR
    Sara arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport feeling rumpled and disoriented, which was not unusual for a trans-Atlantic flight, but not the way one wanted to face Paris for the first time, either. Dixie had tried to persuade her to at least stay a day or two in the city, to see the Eiffel Tower and sit in a sidewalk café, but Sara overruled her. She had booked a room at a B&B in Rondelais, which Dixie had looked up on the Internet and told her was adorable, and the law firm had offered to have a car meet her at the airport, which simplified her life greatly. Sara did not want to try to negotiate the rail system by herself in a country in which she did not speak the language.
    She had been married to a Frenchman and she didn’t speak enough French even to get herself on a train. She felt like more of an imposter than ever.
    Armed with her French phrase book, Sara had spent the half hour in which the plane circled the airport practicing one of the two French sentences she knew: Je voudrais aller a Rondelais , just in case she did have to do battle with a French ticket seller. The other sentence was Ou sont les toilettes? And she practiced that, too, just in case .
    She managed to make her way to baggage claim by scanning for the signs in English, and was just tugging her dark blue suitcase off the conveyor belt when a voice behind her said, “Pardonnez-moi, Madame