“It’s okay,” he says, and I can see in his demeanor that he forgives me. “Let’s just forget it happened,” and like that, it’s forgotten.

Will still doesn’t know that I went to the memorial service yesterday. I can’t bring myself to tell him because he thought we shouldn’t go. I don’t want him to be mad that I went.

But I can’t stop thinking about the strange exchange I witnessed in the church sanctuary, between Jeffrey and his ex-wife. I wish I could talk to Will about it, tell him what I saw.

After she left the memorial service, I followed the ex-wife in my car. I did a U-turn in the street, tailing the red Jeep by thirty feet as she drove the three blocks to the ferry. If Courtney knew I was there, following her, there was no reaction. I sat, idling in the street for ten minutes or so. She sat in her car, on the phone the whole while.

When the ferry arrived, she pulled her car onto the ship. Moments later, she disappeared out to sea. She was gone. And yet she stayed with me, in my mind. She’s with me still. I can’t stop thinking about her. About Jeffrey. About their altercation, about their embrace.

I’m also thinking about Imogen. About her silhouette in the corner of my bedroom at night.

Will runs his fingers through his hair, his version of a comb. I hear his voice, talking over the sound of the bathroom fan. He’s telling me that this evening he’s taking Tate to a Legos event at the public library. They’re going with another boy from school, one of Tate’s playdate buddies. Him and his mother. Jessica is her name, one Will casually drops in the middle of the conversation, and it’s the casualness of it, the familiarity of her name, that rubs me the wrong way, makes me forget for just this moment about Jeffrey and his ex, about Imogen.

For years, Will has been the scheduler of playdates for our boys. Before, it never bothered me. If anything, I felt grateful Will picked up the task in my absence. After school, the boys’ classmates and their mothers would come around to the condo when I was at work. What I imagined was the boys disappearing down the hall to play while Will and some woman I didn’t know sat around my kitchen table, hobnobbing about the other mothers at the elementary school.

I never saw these women. I never wondered what they looked like. But everything is different since the affair. Now I find myself overthinking these things.

“Just the four of you?” I ask.

He tells me yes, just the four of them. “But there will be other people there, Sadie,” he says, trying to be reassuring, and yet it comes off as sarcastic. “It’s not like it’s a private event, just for us.”

“Of course,” I say. “What will you be doing there?” I ask, lightening my tone, trying not to sound like a harpy, because I know how much Tate loves Legos.

Will tells me that they’ll be building something from those tiny bricks I find scattered all over the house, erecting rides and machines that move. “Tate can’t wait. And besides,” he says, turning away from the mirror to face me, “it might do Otto, Imogen and you some good, a few hours alone. Bonding time,” he calls it, and I harrumph at that, knowing there will be no bonding between Otto, Imogen and me tonight.

I step past him. I move from the bathroom and into the adjoining bedroom. Will follows along. He sits on the edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of socks as I get dressed.

The days are getting colder. The coldness leaks into the clinic through the door and windows. The walls are porous, the doors to the clinic always opening and closing. Every time a patient walks in or out, the cold air comes with them.

I dig into a heaping pile of laundry, searching for a brown cardigan, one of those versatile things that go with nearly everything. The sweater isn’t mine. It belonged to Alice. It was in the home when we arrived. The sweater is well loved, worn, which is half the reason I like it. It’s slightly misshapen, covered in pills, with a wide, ribbed shawl collar and big apron pockets I can sink my hands into. Four faux shell buttons line the front of it. It’s close-fitting because Alice was smaller than me.

“Have you seen my sweater?” I ask.

“What sweater?” Will asks.

“The brown one,” I say. “The cardigan. The one that was Alice’s.”

Will says he hasn’t seen it. He doesn’t like the sweater. He always thought it was odd that I laid claim to the sweater in the first place. Where’d you get that? he asked the first time I appeared with it on.

The closet. Upstairs, I said. It must have been your sister’s.

Really? he asked. You don’t think that’s kind of—I don’t know—morbid? Wearing a dead person’s clothes?

But before I could respond, Tate was asking what morbid meant and I left the room to avoid that conversation, leaving it to Will to explain.

Now I find another sweater in the laundry to wear, and slip it over the blouse. Will sits, watching until I’m through getting dressed. Then he rises from the bed and comes to me. He wraps his arms around my waist and tells me not to worry about Jessica. He leans in, whispers into my ear, “She doesn’t stand a chance next to you,” making a poor attempt at humor, telling me that Jessica is a hag, that she bathes infrequently, that half of her teeth are missing, that spit comes flying out of her mouth when she talks.

I force a smile. “She sounds lovely,” I say. Though still I wonder why they have to drive together, why they can’t just meet at the library.

Will leans farther into me, breathes into my ear, “Maybe after the Legos event, after the kids are in bed, you and I can have some bonding time, too.” And then he kisses me.

Will and I haven’t been intimate since the affair. Because every time he touches me, all I can think of is her and I bristle as a result, nipping any suggestion of intimacy in the bud. I couldn’t stake my life on it, but I was sure she was a student, some eighteen-or nineteen-year-old girl. She wore lipstick, that I knew. Hot-pink lipstick and underwear that was flimsy and small, leaving it in my bedroom when she left, which meant that she had the audacity to not only sleep with a married man but to parade around sans underwear. Two things I would never do.