He let one Thursday pass, but then he thought that perhaps it might be awkward socially to see her again if she hadn’t intended it as a joke, if she’d actually been inviting him. Maybe he should go, then. Go, and explain himself. Explain that he’d just been horsing around. Not that he wouldn’t love to, et cetera, et cetera. He didn’t let himself think until later that to ponder going there at all was further horsing around on his part, horsing around with the itch of what had begun to feel like a real possibility. And by then it was too late.

Outside, the shadows have lifted and the birds are launched into the frenzied call-and-response that starts their day. He gets up and comes around the table to the windows. Someone—Annie—has left a sweater on one of the old chairs that sit on the mossy brick patio. Its white is startling against the other, muted tones.

He had misunderstood Rosemary, he knows that now. With the quick turn she’d made on his playful tone, she had seemed to him worldly-wise, sexually sophisticated. After the first time they had sex, he tried to make a light remark about this, about how they had stumbled into bed with each other by accident, each of them joking, neither of them getting the other’s joke.

“I don’t see it that way,” she said.

Suddenly he felt a little short of breath. “Oh,” he said. Her face after sex was pinkish—almost chapped-looking. They were still in bed, in her grand bedroom. Even up here there was an expensive-looking kilim on the floor.

“I don’t see it as an accident at all,” she said.

“You don’t.”

“No, I think it was inevitable.”

He didn’t know what to say to this, or even how to take it; but slowly, over the next few times they were together, he began to understand her, to see that she was, if anything, absurdly romantic. Certainly not jaded, or even sophisticated. She was lonely. In need. This made him feel sorry for her, but it also frightened him.

Ah!—his attention is drawn now by the appearance on her back porch of his elderly neighbor, Karen. She pauses there for a moment, her head tilted back, maybe to smell the morning air. Then she laboriously descends the stairs and begins to survey her garden. She’s dressed in one of what Graham thinks of as her “outfits”—in this case a wide-brimmed straw hat, a knee-length white nightgown, and tube socks. She has bright blue sneakers on her feet. There’s something jagged-looking and silvery on these sneakers—maybe lightning bolts? They glint every now and then as she moves around.

He watches her stand for a few moments in front of various plants, her hands on her hips, as though she were chastising them. Occasionally she bends over to painfully, slowly, pull a weed. Her old cat trails her. Sam, orange with white patches. He twines around her legs when she stands still, his tail lightly whipping her mottled shins.

Graham and Annie are worried about Karen. What were once charming eccentricities have ripened, he would say, into more troubling behavior. She seems addled sometimes. Only a few days earlier he found her in the house when he came home from work, standing irresolutely, frowning, in the middle of his living room.

“What are you doing here?” she’d said sharply to him.

“I might ask you the same question,” he said. “But I won’t.” She laughed then—gaily, it seemed to him—and headed toward the back door.

He thinks now of how strange it is that she should be so much in their lives. More than their own parents ever were—certainly more than his, anyway. And this purely the result of the accident of buying the house next door to hers all those years ago.

Standing at the window, he remembers walking with Annie behind the real estate agent through the dim rooms of the house. Annie, small and slender ahead of him, her dark hair still long then, a thick ribbon down her back, her carriage elegant. The graceful accommodating dancer’s turn to whatever the agent was pointing out.

They’d been house-hunting for a while, feeling more and more discouraged as they slowly discovered how limited their choices were going to be. This, the house they were looking at—the house they ended up buying—was a converted coach house. You walked up a long driveway at the side of the much larger, real house, as he thought of it, to get there.

It had been divided then into what were essentially dark cells, tiny rooms that had depressed him on that walk-through. But what Annie said afterward as they talked about it was that those walls would be as easy to take down as they’d been to put up. That when the towering old pine that leaned over the roof was removed, the light would pour in. That the house was essentially surrounded by open land—all those other people’s backyards. In that era before gardening was chic, most of these yards were overgrown with thick, tall grasses gone to seed—a kind of prairie encircling the house. A prairie, except for Karen’s yard, shockingly lush with the perennials, the roses, the shrubs, that the others would slowly acquire as gentrification took hold.

On the day they moved in, Karen, then middle-aged, a handsome, tall, prematurely white-haired woman with a Brahmin accent, had welcomed them with a jug of the cheap wine they all drank at that time—Almaden or Mateus, something like that—and a strange-tasting pasta casserole she said she’d made herself. When Graham returned the empty dish to her, he asked her what it was, exactly. She told him she’d invented the recipe. “I think what really makes it work, though,” she said in her toney voice, “are the canned plums I always add to it.”

Annie sometimes used this line when she was complimented on a meal. Thinking of this, of her excellent imitation of Karen’s voice and patrician accent, he smiles.

As if on cue, above him, footfalls, and then, a minute later, the rush of water through the pipes: she’s awake. He goes to the coffee machine and with the push of a few buttons, the turn of a valve, makes a cappuccino for her and a second cup for himself.

All this is part of their routine. He gets up first, usually around five. He goes downstairs, he makes his coffee and sits alone with it while he reads the paper—the headlines and maybe an article or two. In the summer, he can watch the sun rising slowly over the houses that back up to his and Annie’s, rising until the tops of the trees in his neighbors’ yards look as if they’ve burst into flame. Usually he enjoys every ritualized part of all this.

Not today.

He brings both cups of coffee up the steep back stairs to their bedroom. When he leans against the bedroom door, it swings open to the dazzling morning light up here. In this light, propped against the pillows on their bed, Annie, in her blue-green kimono.

Maybe because of the light, maybe because of his guilt, maybe because he’s been thinking of Frieda—Frieda, homely and in pain—he sees Annie afresh. Annie, this graceful, delicate woman he’s married to, her wide mouth moving now with pleasure into the smile that transforms her, that thrills him now as much as when he first saw her, thirty years before, at the opening party for the bookstore he still owns.

“My sweet husband,” she says, reaching up with both hands to take the cup he holds out to her.

The bookstore. It had been another part of Graham’s transformation. For years after he quit graduate school—all but dissertation on a doctoral degree in English literature—he taught as an adjunct here and there in the Boston area, finally mostly adult education classes, all the while trying to write his novel. He was slow to give that up, but at some point he saw that he wasn’t going to be able to write a book he’d want to read, or, more important, that he’d want anyone else to read. It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.

As he took stock of himself, he remembered the time when he had worked a part-time job for a year or so in a small bookstore in Harvard Square—gone now—and it seemed to him that he was most happy then, living among books, talking about books. He began to nurture the notion of a bookstore of his own.

So when an uncle of his—the lone success in his mother’s family—died and left him what he described to friends as “a little chunk of change,” he and an older friend, Peter Aiello, who always seemed to have many of those chunks more or less just lying around, bought a storefront on Mount Auburn Street, the plan being that Graham would run the store, with Peter as a silent partner.

On the opening night—of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—Annie walked in with a guy, a guy he’d sent an invitation to for reasons he couldn’t later recall. And in spite of everything that seemed ladylike and elegant about her—her slender dancer’s body, her grave, sober face—she also carried a kind of charge that he felt instantly. He understood it as sexual, yes, and it turned out that was apt—she told him later that she’d been fucking Jeff all that afternoon. But in the moment he imagined it as directed at him, connected to all the changes he’d made and wanted to make in his life, to who he wanted to be; and his impulse was to try to be sure she didn’t somehow slip away.