— Pam doesn’t take all that and offer it to someone else. I don’t come back from a trip unexpectedly and find an unmade bed where you and some guy have been having a lovely time

— It wasn’t that lovely.

— That’s too bad.

— It was far from lovely.

— So, why did you do it, then?

— I don’t know. I just had the foolish impulse to try something different. I didn’t know that real happiness lies in having the same thing all the time.

— Leave my family and business, just like that?

— Gauguin did it.

— I’m a little more responsible than that. Maybe it’s something you would do.

— If it were a choice, she said. Between life and . . .

— What?

— Life and a kind of pretend life. Don’t act as if you didn’t understand. There’s nobody that understands better than you.

— I’ll tell you something funny, Hollis said, something I heard. They say that everything in the universe, the planets, all the galaxies, everything—the entire universe—came originally from something the size of a grain of rice that exploded and formed what we have now, the sun, stars, earth, seas, everything there is, including what I felt for you. That morning on Hudson Street, sitting there in the sunlight, feet up, fulfilled and knowing it, talking, in love with one another—I knew I had everything life would ever offer.