20She wasn’t proud of it, but Molly didn’t call Ben right away to tell him the name of Iris’s lover. She was enjoying having the information all to herself, just for a few hours: turning it over in her mind, imagining how the affair started, wondering who else in the village knew. And did the affair give Iris what she was looking for, Molly wondered. Her own marriage had slammed against the rocks when her husband had an affair, but once she peeled off the top layer of hurt and humiliation, she had understood that the cheating was more a symptom than a cause.
Although she was wary of applying her American viewpoint to something the French felt quite differently about.
And what about Madame Séverin? Was she just an afterthought, if that? Or was her health and mood so poor and intractable t
