I went to the window and I looked at the grounds below and I thought about a woman standing in a restaurant bathroom in Paris being told that the man she had just married loved someone else, being told it by a professional who had been paid to make it land, who had been selected and briefed and positioned with the specific, clinical intention of destabilizing something that was just beginning to exist, something fragile and new and not yet named, the thing that had been growing between two people who had not chosen each other and were discovering, against the expectations of everyone including themselves, that the not choosing had not prevented the growing.
I thought about her face when she came back to the table.
The composed face. The careful, professional blankness of a woman who had
