Check.

Okay, he’d had enough. The top drawers of the desk revealed compact disks, a calculator, stationery, paper clips, string, a high-lighter, index cards, some of which had grocery lists scribbled on them. He, Addison, was nowhere.

But it was impossible, right, to have been involved in a love affair as intense and consuming as theirs was and not discover a trace of it somewhere?

The computer booted. The screensaver was a picture of Greg and the kids on a bench on Main Street, the three of them blowing pink Bazooka bubbles.

Pop. There went his heart.

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

Addison shut the computer off. He was forty-nine years old and had been classically educated—literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, history. The computer, however, was beyond him. At the office he had to ask Florabel for help with anything more involved than e-mail or a standard listing sheet. More to the point, he wanted Greg and the twins to stop ogling him. He was in crisis here! He had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with a woman. That woman was now dead. He had been named executor of her will; he was in charge of all her earthly possessions. Among them he had expected to find proof, however well coded, that she had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with him, too. Admit it! He had expected to find Tess’s heart in an envelope that was addressed to him.

Also on Tess’s desk was her engagement calendar. Okay! Maybe here…? Addison shoved aside the computer keyboard, nearly toppling his drink, and scooted the engagement calendar forward. It was open to the week of June 20, and there on the Monday square was a big heart and inside the heart it said: 12th anniversary! Also in this square it said Charlotte Inn and listed the phone number.

Which part of this was the poisoned tip of the arrow? The adorable hand-drawn heart? The exclamation point? Or the name of the charming inn where Tess was planning on making love to her husband?

Addison flipped back through the calendar to January 7, the day Addison had called Tess and told her to meet him at the cottage in Quaise. She had been anxious on the phone. She had said to him, Jesus, Add, I am so nervous.

And he had said, Just meet me. Nothing has to happen.

She showed up late. She had lost her way, she said. She missed the dirt road and had to double back, then she missed it again. When finally she found it, when she pulled the Kia into the driveway of the cottage, Addison understood what she meant by nervous. Whoa! He had been married twice, and he had bedded many other women in his lifetime, but when Tess stepped out of the car, Addison didn’t know what to do. He wanted to blink them back to the parking lot behind Nous Deux. He wanted to conjure the magic they had felt there. Could he do it?

He didn’t know what to say, so he reverted to real estate agent mode, which put both Tess and himself at ease.

Let me show you the house!

The cottage somehow did the trick. Addison had brought in small bouquets of hothouse flowers, put scented soap in the bathroom, put Vivaldi on the stereo. The cottage had pale pink walls and exposed beams and large windows looking out into the bare woods with a blue ribbon of the ocean beyond. The brass bed had forty pillows stacked up at either end. It was a love nest. Tess gasped, then cooed.

Is this yours?

Oh, you know, he said, and he laughed. It was a joke, especially after Stowe, how Addison could make a house appear anywhere in the world. It’s on loan.

There was silence between them. Awkward. God, what to say? What to do? The Four Seasons trilled along in the background. And then, just when Addison was afraid that he had made a monumental mistake (what had happened the week before in Stowe was a fluke, an illusion created by the circumstances), Tess ran toward him and jumped into his arms. She wrapped her legs around him.

Was it okay to call that the happiest moment of his life?

They had made love on top of the bed and it was… well, think about it! Addison had made love to his wife only a handful of times in the previous eight years, and even then the lovemaking fell somewhere between fair and marginal. To have a whole, happy, warm, responsive, physically delectable woman, a woman he liked, for the first magical and romantic time was… yeah.

Later, when they lay there, gazing out the window at the stark beauty of the daylight fading between the bare, slender trees, Tess admitted that she had not gotten lost at all. His directions had been perfect. She was late because she’d sat in her car at the end of the road, collecting her nerves, and checking in with Greg, who had the kids at the dentist.

It was a day he would never forget, January 7. On Tess’s calendar what it said was: Chloe + Finn, dentist, 3:30 P.M.

Dentist! Addison thought. There should be a hand-drawn heart that said Addison! The Day I Fell in Love!

Addison flipped forward. February. Valentine’s Day, another brutal holiday. Addison had bought Tess a book of love stories. He had driven to the elementary school and surreptitiously left the book on the driver’s seat of Tess’s Kia. Addison asked Tess if she would read the stories. She said she would, but to his knowledge, she hadn’t read a single one.

The square for February 14 said: LoLa 41. 7 P.M.

Which was where she and Greg had gone to dinner.

On March 3, Addison had told Tess he loved her for the first time. They were in the cottage, listening to Billie Holiday. It was pouring rain outside. Addison lit a fire and made two mugs of coffee with Baileys. It was as perfect a scene as he could imagine. When he lay dying, this would be the moment he reflected on.

He set his mug down. He ran a fingertip along Tess’s jawline.

He said, “I love you, Tess.”