I SUGGESTED TO ROGER that he tell his brother about me, about us, because his brother was coming into town to visit while Roger’s wife would be away. Enlisting his brother as our ally could have helped us arrange a lot of time together, at least doubling the length of the afternoons we’d contented ourselves with so far—and any visit could be our last. I also thought it might be a relief for Roger to finally have someone to talk to about me because he’d lamented that inability for years. I thought his brother might also be able to help us keep in touch near the end. His brother had been in an affair that broke his first marriage, and even if he weren’t able to relate, surely he wouldn’t deny his dying sibling this request.

I explained this to Roger when he asked why I would propose such a thing. He was quiet for a beat. Then he told me that his many siblings had all been in marriages that failed. Only he had married just once and stayed married. As far as his Irish Catholic family was concerned, he was a paragon of marital virtue, and that was a source of great satisfaction for him. He wanted his family, his coworkers, and everyone who knew him to continue believing he was a faithful partner in a sterling union.

I saw an aspect of him then that I hadn’t before: his satisfaction at having gotten away with the biggest deception of his life. “I’m so looking forward to seeing you that it’s hard to bear,” he wrote of the few hours we’d steal under his brother’s ignorance. “It’s the one light in my dark universe.” But it wasn’t really the only light. He would die proud of having hidden me. I didn’t know that about him before he got sick. I don’t know if he’d known that about himself.