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crisp Cambridge air. “Bollocks. Come here, you stupid…oh, no, please don’t…shit.” She was standing outside her front door, car keys in her mouth, mobile phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, clutching the most enormous stack of essays escaping from an elastic band. Not only had the first stray papers made a break for freedom, but as the wind picked up, they began to dance around the front garden, taunting Theresa. Two sheets were heading dangerously close to the road. “I’m sorry, Ma. I’ll have to call you back. Somebody’s dissertation is about to get run over by the Maddingley bus.”
    Dressed inappropriately for the chilly weather in a floaty summer skirt and one of Theo’s old shirts, with her tangled mane of pre-Raphaelite curls held precariously in place by a pencil, Theresa dropped everything on the doorstep and began running after the errant essay papers, like an overexcited puppy chasing a butterfly.
    “You all right, T? Can I help?”
    Jenny Aubrieau, Theresa’s next-door neighbor and closest friend in Cambridge, stuck her head over the gate. Jenny was anEnglish scholar, like Theresa, and was married to Jean Paul, a research fellow at Jesus. Jean Paul was always urging Jenny to tell Theresa the truth about her philandering husband—Theo Dexter’s extracurricular love life was the worst-kept secret in the university—but Jenny couldn’t bring herself to do it. For one thing they hung out as couples, which made the whole situation doubly awkward. But more importantly, Theresa was so madly, blindly in love with Theo, the truth would destroy her. Besides, maybe Theo would come to his senses and get over his midlife crisis soon. Jenny Aubrieau hoped so.
    “No, I’m all right,” said a flustered Theresa. “Actually, yes. Grab that one. That one, that one, that one! Oh God.” A single, handwritten sheet flew over the garden gate and dived directly beneath the wheels of an oncoming car. Seconds later more muddy tires pounded it into oblivion.
    “Not the next Shakespeare, I hope?” Jenny helped Theresa retie the remaining papers and carry them out to her car.
    “I very much doubt it,” sighed Theresa. “Still, it’s not very professional, is it?
Sorry what’s-your-name, I threw your essay under a car. We’ll call it a C, shall we, and better luck next time?
God, I hate teaching.”
    “No you don’t.” Jenny chucked the files on the backseat of Theresa’s Fiat and stood back to wave her off.
    “I bloody do. All I want is to be left alone to write.”
    “Drink after work? I have to put Amelie and Ben down at seven, but I’m free after that if you are.” Jenny still felt awkward talking about her children in front of Theresa. She knew how desperately her friend wanted kids. Each pregnancy felt like a betrayal. But there came a point when
not
talking about them felt even more awkward. Particularly as these days Jenny’s every waking hour seemed to revolve around the little sods.
    “I can’t. Not tonight. Theo’s taking me out for dinner at the University Arms hotel. It’s a start-of-term celebration.”
    Jenny Aubrieau watched her friend drive happily away and thought,
I wonder what the bastard’s feeling guilty about this time?
    Nobody was more surprised when Theo Dexter asked Theresa O’Connor to marry him than Theresa O’Connor herself. Born into a dirt-poor Irish farming family in County Antrim, Theresa had always been a dreamer. A hopeless romantic who couldn’t help but see the good in everyone, she appeared to have nothing in common with the worldly, ambitious, self-confident young Englishman whom she first met at a friend’s wedding in Dublin five years ago. Nor could she believe that anyone as handsome and brilliant as Theodore Dexter, by then already in his last year at MIT and sporting a mid-Atlantic accent as fake as his gold Rolex, would be interested in her. Theresa had always considered her life to be an endless series of lucky accidents—the