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something in the drywall, which could be heard rattling inside as it fell. I stood in the hall for a moment, shaken and desolate, exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and headed downstairs to smash her grandmother’s china to smithereens, which is what I was still doing when the police and the paramedics showed up.
     
     
     
     
    “So what happens now?” Jen said. We were standing in the kitchen, attempting a conversation amidst the copious ruins of the shattered china.
    “Shut up.”
    “I know this won’t mean anything to you right now, but I am really sorrier than I’ll ever be able to tell you.”
    “Stop talking.”
    It wasn’t going very well.
    “There’s no excuse for what I’ve done. I’d been unhappy for so long, you know, just kind of lost, and—”
    “Will you please just shut your goddamn mouth?!” I shouted at her, and she flinched as if she thought I might hit her. Her nose had already swelled considerably and was starting to turn a nasty shade of purple in the spot where Wade’s forehead had smashed it earlier. When word of our troubles spread through the neighborhood, her bruised face would be the subject of tireless speculation among the housewives as they whispered over their nonfat lattes.
    I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them in as few words as possible. Do you understand?”
    She nodded.
    “How long have you been fucking Wade?”
    “Judd—”
    “Answer the question!”
    “A little over a year.”
    You’d have thought, after the events of the last half hour, that I was beyond shocking by now. A little over a year wasn’t a fling, a random sexual indiscretion. It was a relationship. It meant that Jen and Wade had an anniversary. On our first anniversary, we had checked into a bed-and-breakfast in Newport. Jen wore a lavender negligee and I read her this goofy poem that made her cry so that later I could still taste the salt on her cheeks. How had Jen and Wade marked their first anniversary? And, now that you mention it, where did they count from? Their first flirtation? First kiss? First fuck? The first time someone said “I love you”? Jen was both sentimental and meticulous with her calendar and no doubt knew the exact dates of every one of those milestones.
    For the last year or so, Jen had been running off at every possible opportunity to have sex with Wade Boulanger, my overly athletic, alpha male boss. It was inconceivable to me, no different than if I’d just found out that she was a serial killer, which would have been preferable actually. I’d have attended the trial, nodded somberly at the guilty verdict, told my story to People magazine, and gone about my business. At least I’d know where I was going to sleep that night.
    “A little over a year,” I repeated. “You’re some kind of liar then, huh?”
    “I’ve become one, yes.” She held my gaze, almost defiantly.
    “Do you love him?”
    She looked away.
    I wasn’t expecting that, and it hurt.
    Jen sighed, a long, dramatic, self-pitying sigh, as I considered the ramifications of slitting her throat with a shard of china. “We had our problems long before things started with Wade.”
    “Well, nothing like the ones we’ve got now.”
    She may have said something after that, but I had stopped hearing her. There was just the crunch of bone china underfoot as I walked across the kitchen, and the wailing hinge of the front door as I swung it open, and the sudden hiss of expelled air when my body finally remembered to start breathing again.
     
     
     
     
    What the hell happens now?
    I sat in my car, still in the driveway, gripping the wheel tight enough to turn my knuckles white, paralyzed with indecision. There is nothing sadder than sitting in a car and having absolutely nowhere to go. Unless, maybe, it’s sitting in a car in the driveway of the home that is suddenly no longer your home. Because, generally, even when you