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same nervous rash that broke out on Danny and Jenny’s foreheads when they were sad and upset. So because for a moment he was vulnerable, and reminded her of a child, and reminded her that he could feel enough pain to cry in public and that she was, as she was with her children, the only person in the world who could stop the tears and end the pain, because of all that, the child’s rash on the grown man’s forehead, Daisy said, “Okay, Paul.” She reached across the table and stroked his forehead lightly with her long fingers. Her pain would come later, she knew, when no one was there to stroke her. “Okay, Paul,” she repeated. “Okay. It’s all right. Okay.”
    —
    Later that night, much later, Daisy lay alone in bed again, propped up on pillows, drinking hot chocolate, feeling stunned and yet somehow queenly. With a gesture of her hand, she could dispense favors. “And to you, I grant complete freedom.” She was enormous in her majesty. The chocolate filled her with sweetness. Paul was sleeping in the guest room, so Daisy had the entire double bed to herself, and she sat right in the middle of it with the blue satin comforter spread out over her knees and the rest of the bed like a realm. The house was very quiet; it was after twelve. At the restaurant, Paul had quickly calmed down and begun to discuss the concrete details of their divorce: how soon he could get it, whom he would use as a lawyer, whom she would use as a lawyer, that he would move out of the house and to Monica’s as soon as possible.
    Daisy had said very little and nodded her head to everything Paul said. I may never see this man naked again, she was thinking inanely, I may never again see this man’s penis. I know the shape of his chest, where his birthmarks are, I know about the peculiar toenail on the little toe of his left foot. All these are things I will never see again. Not that I’ve seen all that much of them recently, his body is not one I’ve held very much in the past few years. Take your weird toenail and go, Paul, who cares, who cares.
    “Daisy,” Paul said, “are you listening?”
    She was beginning to be overcome by a great weariness. “I’m listening, Paul,” she said. “I’m hearing every word you’re saying.” But by the time they were ready to leave she was thinking: Who is this stranger, why is he telling me all these things, what does it matter to me?
    So they rode home in silence. Daisy’s head fell back against the headrest and she dozed as Paul drove. They walked into the house, said ordinary normal words to the babysitter—it really was curious how normal they could act in front of such an audience, a fourteen-year-old girl—and Paul drove the babysitter home. He was a very long time doing it; Daisy suspected in a dull way that he had stopped somewhere to call Monica, to tell her that the evening had been a success.
    When he returned, he came into the bedroom, took his pajamas from the drawer, and said, “I’ll sleep in the guest room tonight.”
    “Oh,” said Daisy, who had brushed her teeth and washed her face and was beginning to wake up. This announcement seemed to bother her greatly, in an obscure way. Paul went into the guest room and shut the door tightly.
    “Oh, well,” Daisy said to the door.
    She went to the bedroom—her bedroom now—and put two pillows in the very middle of the bed, and settled down against them. She sat and drank for a while, staring at the blue comforter and the walls, and feeling rather powerful, because she was the only person in the house who was awake, and also rather sovereign, which in her mind at that moment meant large and stately, and alone. She felt very important somehow, but couldn’t understand why; she supposed it was the shock of Paul’s news. Looking about the room, she saw her mother’s letter lying still largely unread on the bedside table. She picked it up, and began to read. She finished her hot chocolate before she finished the letter, and