It had taken quite a while for Chester’s growing girth and his continuing refusal to set a date to complicate this thinking. In the previous eighteen months they had attended twelve weddings, five christenings and a bris. The effects had been incremental; each on its own did not trouble her but taken together they signaled to Lucilla that at some point in the recent past the chronology of her life had gone seriously awry. Chester was fat and uncommunicative; she was wealthy and well-known; they talked only about television and restaurants, and rarely had sex. Theirs was the lifestyle of exhausted fifty-year-olds, but they were not even married. She had never given birth!