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delicate feet were on the floor. He leaned forward to put his forehead against the wall, as his hands fumbled to arrange his clothing.
    â€œWe should not have done that,” he said.
    â€œDon’t say that, darling,” said Margo Heatherton, with her fingers feathery on the back of his neck. “It was meant to be.”
    In his sudden, depressing clarity of mind, those words—the triteness of them, the written-ness of them, their mawkish melodrama—revealed everything to him. Don’t say that, darling. It was meant to be. Meant to be! Was she kidding him? As if this were some sort of sweeping romance with background music, and bubbling hearts and morning-after flowers—instead of a nauseating, sordid betrayal of all his promises to the only woman he loved, the triumph of dick over soul.
    â€œMeant to be,” he said, turning away from her, buckling his belt.
    She clung to him, hugged herself to his back. “We were meant for each other. I knew it the minute we met.”
    He made a noise of derision, turned his face so she could see his sneer. “What are you talking about, Margo? I have a family. A wife, children, a life. This was a mistake.”
    He pulled gently away from her, but her fingertips kept contact with his shoulders, with his arms, as she said, “We don’t have to tell them right away. We’ll make sure they’re taken care of. But, darling, this isn’t something we can just forget about. It’s too powerful. You know it is.”
    It was like waking from a nightmare into another nightmare. The e-mails and phone calls that followed. The urgency, anger, and pathetic pleading of Margo’s make-believe love. And he—even he heard the naïve stupidity of his replies. Trying to reason with her, trying to explain, as if she didn’t already understand, as if this hadn’t been her script from the beginning, as if she weren’t simply playing out the scenes she had already written in her own mind. As awful as his remorse was, he could not even experience it because he was too steeped in the fear that she would expose him, the woeful woe of having this crazy woman slither her way into the most intimate reaches of his life.
    Then, about a month ago, a little over a month ago, maybe six weeks, it stopped. The e-mails. The phone calls. All of it. Over. Suddenly, completely. On her last call, she had even said to him, “All right, darling. All right. I won’t ever bother you again. This is good-bye forever.”
    Good-bye forever! More trite melodrama. Maybe he should not have allowed himself to hope. But when he heard those words, and the silence after she disconnected, he clutched the dead phone in his sweating hand, shut his eyes, and thought, Thank you, Lord.
    Margo had, in fact, let him be. Day after day went by without word from her. It was as if a deluge had ended. The floodwaters of fear and self-pity slowly drained from inside him until there, revealed beneath, was the underlying moonscape of remorse. What now? Should he tell Grace? Hell, no. He might just as well beat her, might just as well beat one of the children into the hospital before her eyes—it would have been that devastating to her sense of the world, to the underpinnings of her joy in life. And what purpose would it serve? Confession might relieve his torment of guilt, but why should his torment of guilt be relieved? It was his guilt, after all, it ought to be his torment: that’s how he saw it. He just had to live with it, that’s all. Take the medicine. Go to church. Never mind if the ceremony and scripture and Jesus Christ of it all is a little out of your spiritual line at this point. Just go, Cowboy. Get down on your cheating knees. Pray for solace and forgiveness. Swear to become a better man, the man you used to think you were. These were the only answers he could come up with.
    And somehow, after a while, he began to find his way across the