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than she was now. Their wedding photo had been prominently displayed in the living room of their home, right
     above the fireplace. They had their first child when she was twenty-eight and had two more in the next three years. She, like
     so many other women, had trouble losing all the weight she’d gained, but she worked at it, and though she never approached
     what she had once been, compared to most of the women her age with children, she thought she was doing okay.
    And she was happy. She loved to cook, she kept the house clean, they went to church as a family, and she did her best to maintain
     an active social life for her and Jack. When the kids started going to school, she volunteered to help in their classes, attended
     PTA meetings, worked in their Sunday school, and was the first to volunteer when rides were needed for field trips. She sat
     through hours of piano recitals, school plays, baseball and football games, she taught each of the children to swim, and she
     laughed aloud at the expressions on their faces the first time they walked through the gates of Disney World. On her fortieth
     birthday, Jack had thrown a surprise party for her at the country club, and nearly two hundred people showed up. It was an
     evening filled with laughter and high spirits, but later, after they got home, she noticed that Jack didn’t watch her as she
     undressed before getting into bed. Instead, he turned out the lights, and though she knew he couldn’t fall asleep that quickly,
     he pretended he had.
    Looking back, she knew it should have tipped her off that all was not as it seemed, but with three children and a husband
     who left the child rearing up to her, she was too busy to ponder it. Besides, she neither expected nor believed that the passion
     between them would never go through down periods. She’d been married long enough to know better. She assumed it would return
     as it always had, and she wasn’t worried about it. But it didn’t. By forty-one, she’d become concerned about their relationship
     and had started perusing the self-help section of the bookstore, looking for titles that might advise her on how to improve
     their marriage, and she sometimes found herself looking forward to the future when things might slow down. She imagined what
     it would be like to be a grandmother or what she and Jack might do when they had the time to enjoy each other’s company as
     a couple again. Maybe then, she thought, things would go back to what they had once been.
    It was around that time that she saw Jack having lunch with Linda Gaston. Linda, she knew, worked with Jack’s firm at their
     branch office in Greensboro. Though she specialized in estate law while Jack worked in general litigation, Adrienne knew their
     cases sometimes overlapped and required a collaboration, so it didn’t surprise her to see them dining with each other. Adrienne
     even smiled at them through the window. Though Linda wasn’t a close friend, she’d been a guest in their home numerous times;
     they’d always gotten along well, despite the fact that Linda was ten years younger and single. It was only when she went inside
     the restaurant that she noticed the tender way they were looking at each other. And she knew with certainty they were holding
     hands under the table.
    For a long moment, Adrienne stood frozen in place, but instead of confronting them, she turned around and headed out before
     they had a chance to see her.
    In denial, she cooked Jack’s favorite meal that night and mentioned nothing about what she’d seen. She pretended it hadn’t
     happened, and in time, she was able to convince herself that she’d been mistaken about what was going on between them. Maybe
     Linda was going through a hard time and he was comforting her. Jack was like that. Or maybe, she thought, it was a fleeting
     fantasy that neither of them had acted on, a romance of the mind and nothing else.
    But it wasn’t. Their marriage began spiraling