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What Rosie had been talking about before she had to pause was the first time they filed for life insurance.

            “Standard questions, obviously, do you smoke, how much do you drink—and I just got, do you remember, you found me in the kitchen, crying?” Rosie looked at her husband, then the camera. “It was something about filling in our ages. You know, I’m older than him by twelve years, actually, and I was sitting there, filling the whole thing out and I realized there wasn’t a question on that form, on any form, that I couldn’t answer. I realized that we—we really had the same life. That we’d been the same person. I don’t know, that he really was my very closest friend, and I was sitting there with a ballpoint and that stupid form, and it just made me cry.”

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We docked in the same port town where my parents used to take me on vacation to snack on Yarlsberg cheese cubes and “sunbathe” under cloudy skies. With it coming on November, the beaches were deserted, except for the people waiting on their loved ones in the ferry, and old couples, strolling slowly, stooped and sweatered.

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            “Do you remember the nightlights?” she asked, referring to something I’d made while she was pregnant to illuminate her frequent nighttime trips to the toilet. While we were still living in Providence, my mother used to send me care packages filled with Crown Prince kipper snacks. The empty tins were everywhere, accumulating monthly in oil slicked piles at the bottom of the trash. With a little nautical rope and miniature red Christmas bulbs, I was able to fashion a series of maritime “red light” district nightlights for her that we still had somewhere in our Paris basement.

            “Yeah,” she said, looking past me. “Maybe you should wash those.”

            I was determined not to pick at her verbal barbs.

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The guest room in our house, like many guest rooms in other houses I suspect, is hardly used by guests. On rainy days, Camille likes to play with the random assembly of knick knacks we keep in a trunk at the foot of the bed: unorganized photographs in envelopes; two Polaroid cameras; an awful blanket that Inés gifted us with after a trip to Peru when she was into everything yak; a poncho from that same trip that Anne wore once to make her mother happy and was rewarded for her efforts with an angry neck rash; a small army of stuffed animals that Camille no longer plays with; and three pairs of worn-out New Balance sneakers that I can’t bear to throw out.

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            Outside, I folded the towel to use as padding under my knees, got down, and started scrubbing. I didn’t know whether to acknowledge the surge of happiness coursing through my body or to re-establish the levels of anxiety and desperation that had defined my central nervous system over the last few days.

            What would I need if I had read those letters? What would I be feeling? Would I want some kind of balls-out confession, or would I want, as Anne seemed to, to be left alone?

            Years of co-habitation with a lawyer had taught me that you could often find clarity to a problem by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Anne cheating on me. It was unfair and probably naïve and not a little bit condescending, but my mind wouldn’t let me go there. Every time I made a small advance in the scenario in my head, there was something there to stop me. Where would she find the time, for one? And it would have to be someone outside of our social circle. But Anne didn’t go gallivanting around photography exhibits all day. She worked.

            I scrubbed extra hard in circles around the donkey’s tail. Anne was a defense attorney, used to dealing with men who lied. The fact that I couldn’t imagine her cheating on me meant that I didn’t want to, because I couldn’t handle it if she did. I scrubbed and scrubbed, each push of my hand accompanied by a self-defacing mantra. Can’t take his own medicine. Tit for tat.

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Before that, during University, I fell in with a local chap named “Moose” whose thing was reverse graffiti: at night, he’d sneak into the city’s tunnels and passageways where he’d use a high-pressure washer to clean away the grime and muck in order to reveal his designs. He’s had a bit of success now, and gone the other way. Last I heard of him, he was going to reverse graffiti a giant swoosh for Nike on the back of the South Bank Centre building for the “Best of the Best” advertising awards conference.

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Just before I reached the golf course by their house, I saw a dead rabbit on the side of the road. I spent the remaining three minutes of the drive deciding that there were lots of bunnies hopping around the green, lots of opportunities for passing cars to kill them, and that I shouldn’t take the creature’s demise as a sign that I, too, was minutes away from having my organs crushed.