“Absolutely,” said Marse.

“Just you wait,” I said.

Margo was looking at me. “I know you suspect him.”

“Sweetheart, I’m not sure this is the time—”

“Dad and I talked about it,” she said.

I looked at Dennis. I saw something like contrition in his eyes. If times had been normal, if Dennis had been well, I would have told Margo we’d discuss this in private. But these weren’t normal times, and it was rare that Margo wanted to talk, so I put my napkin in my lap and leaned back in my chair. There was a warm breeze off the golf course. It was almost eight o’clock, and still men drove carts this way and that, their deep voices carrying in the breeze. “OK,” I said. “What is it I suspect him of?”

Dennis made a sound to get Margo’s attention, then shook his head.

“You didn’t tell her?” she said to him. She sounded touched. To me, she said, “It was months ago. Dad told me that Stuart and the therapist—well, they’re a little too close for comfort.” She put her fork down on her plate. “That pixie bitch.”

“Oh, my,” said Marse.

Paul said, “Sweetie, he’s a flirt. A lot of men are. It doesn’t mean—”

“He thinks he’s in love,” she said.

Paul looked at Dennis and Dennis shrugged, agreeing. I scooted my chair until I was beside Margo. It made scraping noises on the cement patio. I put my arm around her, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She looked relieved. “People make mistakes,” I said. “They get caught up. They go overboard.” I could scarcely believe I had said it.

“They do, people do,” said Marse. She was on Margo’s other side, holding her hand.

“It’s been a year,” said Margo.

“Has anything happened?” said Marse.

“He says no,” said Margo. “He swears. And now he wants to take this contracting job, and move, and he expects me to go with him, even after this.”

“Move where?” I said.

She wouldn’t meet my eye. “Seattle.”

“You can’t possibly move to Seattle,” said Marse. “It rains every day there.”

Paul nodded. “Seattle is out of the question.”

“Well, he’s going,” Margo said. And—it shames me to remember—my first response was panic. I couldn’t have Margo so far away, and—this was possibly even more imperative to me at the time—Stuart could not leave, not yet. We needed him. He was the only one who could lift Dennis out of the bathtub when Lola wasn’t around. He was the only one who liked to do yard work and play poker past midnight when everyone else but Dennis wanted to sleep. He could drive the boat and load the wheelchair into the car, and, most important, he was distracting. If he’d been with us at the table, I might have told him so. As it was, I said to my daughter, “Then you’ll just have to let him go.” I’m glad I said it. It was the right thing to say, I thought, and when Margo looked at me—my daughter, searching my face for guidance—I was sure of it.

That night, I lay next to Dennis in his little cot, my head on his chest, and listened to his raspy breathing. “I didn’t know you were suspicious,” I said to him. “Did you know I was?”

He shook his head. I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted so badly to talk.

“Did you not tell me because you didn’t want to upset me?”

He shrugged.

“Did you not tell me because I depend too much on Stuart?”

He was still.

“I guess I do,” I said. “Some mother I am.”

He made his sweet, throaty laugh sound.

“Should I have told her?”

He made a noise, a definitive sound that meant no.

“Why is it that you can break her heart but I can’t?”

He shrugged again. It was true—if I had told her, she would have argued with me and been angry. Dennis, though, had leeway. It wasn’t meddling when it was her father. She trusted him never to hurt her intentionally. This wasn’t rational, and I didn’t think it was based on historical evidence, but it was how things were.

I stopped by Margo’s house later that week, when I knew she would be at work. Stuart was in the backyard, mowing the lawn. It seemed that anytime I stopped by, he was outside, keeping busy. I stood at the sliding glass doors in the living room until he noticed me and turned off the mower.

“I let myself in,” I said when he was standing in front of me, sweating through his shirt.

“That’s fine.”

“I just want to know when you’re moving. I’m not mad.”

He wiped his face with one hand. “I appreciate it. No one likes it when you’re mad.”

“Don’t joke.”

His face fell. I saw that he was sorry he’d let me down. I’m sure that was doubly true for letting Dennis down. I remembered them together on the boat when Stuart was still learning, glancing up at Dennis expectantly, absorbing every direction, every mild criticism or bit of praise. “I told them I have some work to finish in Miami first,” he said. “I’m not leaving yet.”

I searched his face. “Margo’s not going with you.”

“I wish she would.”

“Tough.” I started toward the front door, then stopped. I half-turned back to him, but I didn’t meet his eye. I said, “A couple of years ago, I met a man.” I didn’t know what I meant to say, or why I was saying it. “We became close. Nothing happened. In the end it didn’t matter, I guess. There’s a larger picture. You might not know this yet.” It was a betrayal of Margo, I thought, to talk to Stuart this way. “I’m just saying that marriages go through phases,” I said limply.

“I guess they do,” he said. Then, “I’ll be over by noon. Tell Dennis to get his poker face ready.” I left the house without saying anything else, and as I got back into my car and fastened my seat belt, relief flooded through me. This was not entirely rational, but it was very real.

Later that month, we ordered and received a BiPAP machine that Dennis wore during sleep to help him breathe. At first, the low roar it made kept me awake all night but after a week we’d both gotten used to it. One night around this time I woke spontaneously, for no reason I could name, and when I looked out into the room, I saw a figure standing at the French doors that led out to the swimming pool, and a cry caught in my throat. I looked at Dennis’s bed, thinking all at once that I needed him to protect me and I needed to protect him, but his little low cot was empty and his blanket was on the floor. Then I looked back at the dark figure and realized that it was my husband—standing on his own legs, having walked several paces without assistance. I held my breath. Dr. Auerbach had told us that once a patient is bedridden, the time left is measurable in months, not years. Dennis had been bedridden, more or less, for six months. He was still helped out of bed every few days for a roll or a boat ride, but otherwise he had only enough energy to move his arms a little, play a little bit of a game, maybe smile or laugh a bit, or take a few bites of frozen yogurt. Still, here he was, standing at least six feet from his bed, staring out at the canal. I got up quietly and walked until I was next to him. I had to will myself—it took all my strength—not to touch him, not to so much as take his elbow. He looked over at me when he sensed me beside him, and he smiled. Then he looked out through the glass again. Outside, moonlight washed the blue-black lawn and cast a sheen on the water in the canal. The gumbo-limbo tree at the back corner of our property bent in the wind. In the dark, Dennis’s profile was a mask of contentment and peace. I’d loved him for half my life. I’d loved him beyond the limits of how much love I’d thought I could generate. I missed him less in that moment, as we stood side by side watching the backyard in the moonlight, than I had in a year, maybe two. Then I took his hand, and when I did—it hurts me to remember—he lost his footing, and he fell.

Dennis died almost two months later, and we scattered his ashes in the bay and spent a long evening on the boat in the windless night, watching the lights of Miami in the distance. Margo slept over for a week, at which point I convinced her that I could be left alone. When she was gone, I missed her. In the next year, Stuart left Miami for the job in Seattle, then returned after six weeks so that he and Margo could try again to be together. Grady had a mild stroke that left the right side of his face a bit lazy, but he was otherwise his old self; he and Gloria invited me for dinner every Sunday night. Margo stopped by every other day or so, and we continued to take water aerobics classes together, though Cynthia was replaced by another instructor, who was not as good. Margo returned to sailing on the weekends. She said being on the water reminded her of him. She started a program teaching jazz dance to street kids in Liberty City, and this quickly became her full-time job, and she left the college altogether. Marse and Paul got a dog and named it Bennett. Marse wanted a big wedding but Paul said he’d already done all that, so she told him she didn’t need reminding that this wedding wasn’t special to him, then stormed out and spent the night at my house. They made up in the morning. They were married at the Barnacle, on the water, she in a green dress and he in a guayabera. They honeymooned in Peru and brought me a small cement bust, an infant head, which I perched on the windowsill in the kitchen. I played a lot of tennis, and at night I sat in the living room and looked around at the items that had populated my life—our life—for so long, and instead of getting easier this became unendurably painful, and I knew I had to go.

I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where decades before, Dennis and I had spent a long autumn weekend at a bed-and-breakfast. We’d hiked and admired the foliage and watched street musicians in Pritchard Park. With the profit from the sale of the big house, I gave Stuart and Margo a nest egg and bought myself a two-bedroom brick townhouse on a quiet street. Gloria drove up with me and helped me arrange my kitchen, then flew back to Miami. Before she left she told me she envied me a little, retiring to a quieter life, but I think she was only trying to lessen my guilt over leaving them, over leaving Margo. I took a part-time office job and joined the local tennis club, where I play doubles with a woman who also has been widowed. My mother lives a three-hour drive away, and almost every weekend I visit her or she visits me. During my first summer, Bette and Suzanne flew out and we shopped for antiques. Margo and Stuart came for my first Christmas, and it snowed.