She and Peter had begun dating at nineteen. She’d broken up with him twice in college. Both times, he’d convinced her to take him back, saying he couldn’t live without her. She didn’t really believe him capable of such extreme emotion. He’d always be stable and predictable, she felt.

She’d seen from the beginning that he was very ambitious. When she thought the worst of him, she thought that everything in his life⁠—⁠his friendliness, his interests in children’s charities and golf, every single one of his acquaintances⁠—⁠was in fact only his ambition in all its various forms, as if he were just one thing, really, like a little mechanical device clacking its way upward.

In his own way, Peter could be distant, simply because he was so focused on his work. But in his distance he assumed the best of her. So he seemed to have no sense that she was having an affair, once she was. She continued to sleep with Eleu after they returned to New York.