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better.”
    “Do you understand the enormity of this, Owen? What you’ve done?”
    Blue is lying on the ground with her paws on either side of her wide head. She looks just like a bear rug, like we always said.
    “Of course I do,” he says. “And that’s why I told you, Daph. The guilt has been eating me up inside.”
    I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. “Then why?” Dammit. The tears well up and I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold them back. Forget it. Let him see me cry. He should see how he’s hurt me. “Then why, Owen? Why? ” The sobs come quicker and harder, straight from my gut, from some deep horrible place inside of me. “Why would you do this to us? Do you know how crazy it is, Owen? How fucked up?”
    His head falls deeper between his shoulders. “I know.”
    “I need to know why you did it.” I’m shaking. I take a deep breath and try to collect myself. I need information. Information will make this better. If I can understand it, maybe it will fix it. When I put my hands to my face to wipe my tears, we both notice how I’m trembling. I see the way that he looks at my hands. The same thing happened—for entirely different reasons—on our wedding day. We were standing beneath the canopy of a massive oak tree in a grassy corner of Owen’s grandparents’ backyard in the Berkshires. The minister, a family friend, had just proclaimed it: I now pronounce you husband and wife. I started to shake, I was so happy. I was trembling, bursting with euphoria. We were laughing as he started to kiss me.
    “Tell me how it happened.” I can feel the acid churning in my stomach, corkscrewing through my center.
    He takes a deep breath. “We’ve been friends for a while,” he says.
    “How nice,” I say. I look up at the ceiling, where the planks are painted a color that people call haint blue , a Southern tradition thought to help keep out evil spirits. “Amazing that I never heard you mention her.”
    He rubs his hands over his face and then looks at me. “It’s hard to explain. I can’t even explain it to myself. I know that you don’t want to hear that and I don’t expect you to sympathize.”
    “I realize that there are a lot of people in my situation who probably wouldn’t want to know the details, Owen, but unfortunately for both of us, I do. If I know the facts, then maybe my mind won’t keep replaying everything I’ve imagined over the past twenty-four hours. Tell me,” I continue. “How did it happen?”
    He clears his throat and jingles his keys again. “When it first started, it wasn’t…it wasn’t anything involved,” he finally says. Owen is never like this in an argument. He is direct, even, and steady. I was always the one who had trouble articulating what I needed to say.
    “ Involved? Come on, Owen. Be frank with me. So it was purely physical?” Once it’s out of my mouth, I second-guess how much I really want to know.
    “It started out as just flirting, harmless office flirting,” he says.
    “Harmless?”
    He shakes his head and starts again. “We got to know each other better, started getting lunch every once in a while. And then, in January…”
    “You slept together.”
    He nods. “Daph, I was so guilt-ridden, it fucked me up so much, I cut things off with her right away.”
    “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
    He sighs.
    “Where did it happen?”
    He looks up at me.
    “I want to know, Owen.”
    “Her apartment.”
    “And I was where?”
    “Here.”
    I nod. I feel sick thinking of myself at home reading, shopping online, folding laundry, oblivious to what was really going on.
    “I thought about telling you right away. But it was just the one time and I told myself that that was it. I knew that if I told you, you’d never forgive me, and I couldn’t face that.”
    My stomach is roiling. “But you can now.”
    He sucks in his lips and shakes his head. “Daph, the thing is, even though it was just the one time, I’m still