Chapter 1

They'd met the way couples met nowadays, online, paired up because they were both self-proclaimed book nerds, both seeking a stable monogamous relationship without kids. He'd been married before, just after college, for three years. It had been an amicable divorce (according to Alan) and there hadn't been any children. He said he had no idea what his ex-wife was even doing with her life now—they'd lost touch completely.

Alan and Martha, after a few introductory texts, had met for dinner, Alan driving to Portsmouth from his home outside of Scarborough in Maine. The best part about dinner that night—besides the truffle fries—was that there were no awkward silences. Alan was chatty, and funny, and unselfconscious. Martha didn't exactly feel romantic stirrings, but she did have fun. And later that night she told herself that having fun while eating in a restaurant with a strange man was no small thing. She hadn't dated anyone in more than ten years. And she hadn't had sex for five years, not since a brief and awkward coupling at her fifteen-year college reunion. So she told herself to say yes to Alan Peralta, yes to further dinner dates, yes to sex if that was something he was interested in, yes to being in a relationship with him.

And that was what she did. She kept saying yes. It wasn't hard to do. Alan was very sweet, easy to be with. Yeah, he made a lot of dumb jokes, but he knew they were dumb. And when they eventually got around to having sex, that part was nice, too. She wasn't exactly attracted to Alan, who was raw and bony with deep-set eyes, but he had a grace about him, and at least he didn't want to do anything strange in bed, except for some occasional dirty talk whispered into her ear.

Martha would have been happy to simply stay in a committed relationship, but Alan's mother was a strict Catholic, and the most important person in Alan's life, so during a weekend away to Kennewick on the southern shore of Maine, Alan lowered himself to a knee while they were on a cliffside walk and asked Martha to marry him. It was a moment that Martha had long believed would never happen to her, any kind of proposal, let alone such an old-fashioned one, and she had been filled with a surge of gratitude and love that propelled her to tell him yes right away. Toward the end of the trip, however, Alan said that he'd noticed she'd been quieter since the proposal, and she'd had to admit that he was right.

"Maybe it feels too sudden," she said. "Give me one week."

As it happened, Alan was traveling for the next week and Martha spent that time thinking about her decision. She did love him, she believed, although she wondered if she was truly in love with him. He had never really raised her pulse. And she had never yearned for him when he was away. But she realized that those two negatives, even the phrasing of them, were clichés about romantic love, and not necessarily based in reality. She loved his company. They could talk to one another. He smelled nice. And one thing she kept coming back to was a moment when they had first been casually dating, an evening in Portsmouth, when they were taking a stroll after dinner out. They'd been walking side by side along a dark sidewalk. It wasn't raining, but it had rained all day and there were still puddles on the streets, and the occasional drip of water from gutters and trees. At one point during the walk they approached a section of the sidewalk where water was still falling in a steady flow from a large hotel awning. Without slowing down Alan had slid his hand around Martha's waist and guided her smoothly away from the dripping water. Gallantry, but with the grace of a dance move, and Martha still remembered the tiny shiver that had coursed through her body when he'd touched her.

And maybe that was more important than yearning, just having someone looking out for you in small ways. Yearning never lasted anyway. Kindness did.

Martha said yes to Alan when he returned from his trip. She told herself she wouldn't be completely giving up her independent life. Alan traveled so much for work that she'd have plenty of time alone.

They honeymooned in London, Alan making a list of pubs he wanted to visit (he had a passion for beer), and Martha was happy to go along. Toward the end of that trip they'd visited an elegant Victorian pub during a rainy afternoon, Martha studying her Fodor's travel guide while Alan leaned against the elaborate bar chatting with the bartender. She watched him, his loud American voice at odds with the quiet man behind the bar, noting the way that Alan won over the reluctant Brit, who was now smiling and giving Alan tastes of the different beers they had on cask. It was at this moment that Martha had two competing thoughts. One, that she'd married a nice man. And, two, that he was a complete and utter stranger to her. She realized she didn't really know him any better now than she had after that first date, when she'd returned home to her two-bedroom house in Portsmouth and decided that if Alan wanted to see her again, she'd agree.

A year later, and there were some days Martha never thought of her husband. And some days he was all she seemed to think about.

It was natural, she supposed. Even though she was thirty-nine she was still a newlywed, married less than a year. She actually hated the word "newlywed," or hated other people saying it, like Donna from the library, who called her "the newlywed" in a wink-wink kind of way for about six months after she and Alan were married. Martha preferred the phrase "newly married," but however you said it, that was what she was, a newly wedded person, with all that that implied.

On the days she didn't think much about him it was because of how seamlessly he'd slid into her life. Alan was a careful and predictable man, and Martha had a careful and predictable life. On the days she thought about him, it was because there was something inexplicable about his presence, something that nagged at her. Back in high school and all through college Martha had kept a journal that was entirely made up of passages from books she loved, and poems that she would copy out in her tight cursive handwriting. She spent hours transcribing in her journal, and every once in a while she would come across a word, a word she knew well, that would suddenly not make any sense. She'd be convinced it was spelled wrong, or completely made-up by the poet or author. This never happened with a word like "crepuscular," but always with a simple word like "apron." Suddenly she'd be staring at it and the word would make absolutely no sense. That was what Alan was like, a plain even-tempered man who sometimes made no sense.

He was away right now, on a business trip to Denver. She thought of them as business trips, but that implied breakfast meetings and decision-making and men and women in suits. Alan was really a traveling salesman, maybe the last traveling salesman in the modern world, Martha sometimes thought. He did wear suits when he went to conventions, but that was so he could wear one of his ties that were for sale. He sold novelty clothing items at teachers' conferences. Not just ties, but also buttons, and silk scarves for the female teachers. He sold T-shirts as well, and vests. Most of what he sold was math- and science-related. Ties decorated with the periodic table, buttons that celebrated Pi Day. Even though he never brought his merchandise home—he owned a storage unit in Newington—she'd seen a bunch of it just a month ago when she'd gone to visit him at a local high school math teachers' conference. He'd been wearing his uniform—the dark pants, the white shirt—but he'd also been wearing suspenders filled up with funny buttons, and a red tie with the times table on it. Before they'd gone to lunch, she watched him sell a young female teacher a T-shirt that read math teachers aren't mean. they're above average.

Maybe she thought more about him when he was away. No, she definitely did. Jean, one of the library regulars, was talking to her about Downton Abbey, and Martha, who had been thinking of Alan, was suddenly aware that she'd been asked a question and couldn't remember what it was.

"Sorry, Jean, what?" Martha was behind the desk, slowly working her way through a pile of returned books, and Jean's head bobbed on the other side of the desktop computer.

"Do you think that someone will write a Downton Abbey novel?"

Jean had asked Martha that before. "If there's money in it, then I suspect someone will do it."

"You should do it, Martha." Jean was apparently under the impression that because Martha read so much, she would also be able to write a publishable book.

"I should, shouldn't I?" she said to Jean. "Make a fortune. Leave this library for good."

"Oh, Martha." Jean smiled. She wore no makeup except for lipstick and some of it was on her right canine. Martha decided not to tell her.

Alan was coming home from Denver that night, a flight that was getting in around midnight. Maybe that was why she was thinking about him so much today. When he was around, he was simply there, blending into the well-worn furniture of their cozy house. But during his trips away, and immediately upon his return, he loomed large in her mind.

She wondered why that was, and suspected it had something to do with what had happened when—a few trips ago—he'd returned from Connecticut. She'd been standing at the bedroom window after hearing his car pull onto their pebble drive. It was a little before dusk, the light with that magical glow that clarifies everything it touches, and she could see Alan's face as he got out of the driver's side and went around to the back of his Hyundai to retrieve his luggage. He was tall and angular but moved with a languid elegance—it was what most attracted Martha to him initially. There was a grace about him that didn't fit his rather studious face, gaunt almost, with large eyes. But that night, watching from her window, it was like she'd never seen him before. His face had an almost cold, ruthless look to it. She told herself she was seeing him from a distance, and that he was tired, but still, it was alarming to witness an expression on his face that she felt she'd never seen before. After gathering his luggage and locking his car, he then stood for a moment looking toward the sunset, his jaw slack, his eyes empty and uncaring. Then she watched him take a deep breath, swelling his chest. He shook his head and his expression changed, back to the vacuous sweetness of the Alan she knew. He even smiled, as though he were willfully transforming himself. Then he headed indoors.

She came down the stairs to meet him, and he greeted her the way he always did. A huge grin, some corny joke such as, "Honey, I'm home," or "Was that your boyfriend I saw going out the back?" and then they hugged. Sometimes upon his return he'd used the phrase, "Hello, family." It struck her as overly sentimental, although a part of her was moved by the sentiment.

But that moment from the summer, that view of his unguarded self outside of their house, had stayed with her. She forgot it when he was around, but often thought of it when he was on a trip, and almost always thought of it on the days he returned.

The last hour at the library went fast. One of her favorite patrons, Mr. MacNeice, who came in at least twice a week, had asked her for recommendations of woman authors he hadn't read yet. She'd mentioned a few of her favorites—Edith Wharton, George Eliot, Joan Didion—but he told her he wanted young, contemporary writers. Mr. MacNeice (Martha thought his first name might be Alec, but she wasn't sure) was at least eighty years old, if not older. They browsed the stacks together and he ended up leaving with Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel. Martha knew he'd return in less than a week having read both books.

She left the library in Kittery at about a quarter after five and got back to her house in Portsmouth ten minutes later. Even though she worked in Maine and lived in New Hampshire, on more than one occasion she'd actually walked to the library, just two miles away, over the Piscataqua River.

The house she shared with Alan was a cottage-style two-bedroom, its top floor a recent addition by the previous owners. The front of the house had a large living area that led into a small dining room and smaller kitchen. Upstairs were the two bedrooms, and a strangely large bathroom dominated by a hot-tub bath in black tile. Alan had let her decorate the house, and she'd filled it with bookshelves and overstuffed furniture. Before taking off her coat, Martha fed Gilbert his dry food. He meowed at her, his standard complaint, then consented to try it. She then made herself her own dinner. When Alan was away she rarely cooked. Instead, she would put cheese and deli meat and crackers and some fruit and sometimes some carrots on a cutting board and bring it with her to living room. She put on one of the home renovation shows that she liked and Alan didn't, and slowly picked away at the food on the board. She didn't particularly care for the couple who were having their very beige house redone into another beige house, and she found herself thinking about Alan again. After he'd returned from that trip to Shepaug University in Connecticut, after she'd watched him from the bedroom window, she'd decided to look up the conference he'd just been to. It was a strange whim. Well, maybe not strange. Alan always let her know where he was going and she often took a look at the conference sites. It was curiosity.

When she'd typed in the words "Shepaug" and "teachers' conference," the first thing that came up was a news story. One of the participants, a middle school art teacher from Woodstock, New York, named Josie Nixon, had committed suicide over the weekend. It was a short news article from a local paper. She'd apparently jumped from the sixth-floor balcony of the dormitory that she had been staying in. There was a mention that the police had concluded there had been no foul play, and then there were two paragraphs about how this latest death had reignited an argument about the dormitory building itself. Apparently, since it had been built, there had been more than one jumping death from the open balconies.

The day after Alan had returned from that trip she'd asked him about Josie Nixon, and he'd given her a blank look before saying, "Oh, I heard about that. Terrible."

"Did you know her?"

"I don't understand the question," Alan said. It was a minor annoying habit of his, that instead of simply asking Martha what she meant, he always said how he didn't understand her question.

"I mean, did you have any contact with her during the conference? Did she buy anything from you?"

"I guess she might have, but if she did, I don't remember. My customers are like one big blur to me, honestly."

Martha thought that was the end of the conversation, but about five minutes later, after talking about something else, Alan said, "It did cast a major pall over the conference when word got around."

"What do you mean?" Martha said.

"The young woman who killed herself. After word got around, the conference turned kind of grim. The weather didn't help, either."

That had been the end of their conversation on the suicide. But she'd thought about it—the way he looked on his return, those few words—repeatedly. She'd read somewhere once that our memories are never reliable, that what we are actually remembering is not the event itself, but a replay of the last time we remembered the event. Our minds play videotapes, and those videotapes degrade over time. Martha wondered about that now as she pictured Alan in the driveway, the setting sun burnishing him, his face empty of any kind of humanness. And then she pictured him gathering himself, taking a breath, and smiling. In the beginning she'd read this action as him trying to change his mood, shake off the road, and prepare to enter back into his real life. But now she saw it differently. The smile wasn't for him. It was a smile that would be for her. He was practicing, the way an actor might alter their face or posture while waiting in the wings for their cue. He was practicing his smile.