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other after the affair. It was as though he had burned the bridge that linked them, and she had never been able to connect with him again. And now he was gone.
    The two couples stood making their driving arrangements to get back to the city. Jean said she would drive Stephanie down in their SUV, while Fred went alone in his new Ferrari, and Brad and Alyson went home in Brad’s Porsche. They had left the Mercedes station wagon for the kids and the au pair. For the Freemans and particularly the Dawsons, their cars defined who they were. Stephanie didn’t care and drove a four-year-old SUV.
    “Are you okay?” Jean asked gently as she helped Stephanie into the car. Stephanie was deathly pale. She got in seeming confused, like someone who had been ill for a long time. She kept thinking about Bill that morning, and a thousand mornings before this, and all the things they hadn’t said to each other. And how was she going to tell her kids? She’d have to tell them on the phone, since all of them were in other cities, and now they had to come home. “Do you want me to call the kids?” Jean offered as Stephanie shook her head, staring out the window and seeing nothing, and then she turned to look at Jean.
    “We never really got back together, after…after what he did. We just pretended, but it was never the same.” Jean had known that without Stephanie admitting it to her. It had been obvious to anyone who knew them.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Jean said quietly as they drove away toward the city. “You loved each other. Those things are hard to recover from.”
    “I went back to him for the kids…but I loved him too. I just didn’t trust him anymore. And Bill was never good at talking about things, so we never did after a while. He didn’t want to, and I didn’t either. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other and doing all the things we had to do.” But the joy had gone out of their marriage seven years before, or maybe long before that. She couldn’t remember now. Whatever it had been, or had once been, or never was, it was over now.
    Jean couldn’t help wondering what she would feel if Fred died now. Sad, probably. Their marriage had been a sham for so many years, but she was used to him. She liked to say to her friends, somewhat tongue in cheek, that their marriage was a genuine fraud. But in some ways they cared about each other, no matter how disappointing it had been.
    “I’m sure he always loved you,” Jean tried to reassure her, whatever she believed, which was colored by her own view of men. “Men just do stupid things. Fred has been an idiot for most of our marriage. He started cheating on me even before our kids were born, and I was young then. He figured I wouldn’t know.”
    “Why did you stay with him?” Stephanie asked, turning to her with a dazed look. She was still in shock, but talking to Jean was helping her try to stay focused on some kind of reality. Jean was the life preserver she was clinging to.
    “I still loved him in those days. It took me a few years to get over it, but I did,” she said with a wintry smile, and Stephanie laughed. Jean was so awful about Fred, but most of the time the way she said it sounded funny. But it couldn’t have been easy to live with, any more than Stephanie’s situation with Bill was, after the affair. At least he had never cheated again, that she knew of. All those thoughts kept racing through her head as they drove down from Tahoe. She was grateful that Jean was driving. She couldn’t have made the trip on her own, she was too distracted, and stunned. It all felt unreal.
    They got to the city in just under four hours, Jean parked the car in front of Stephanie’s garage on Clay Street, and followed her inside. They left the suitcases, skis, and poles in the car. And Bill’s boots were back there too. The ski patrol had taken them off before they sent him to the city in the ambulance, and had gotten his hiking boots from the locker.