“A couple of bad years, huh?”

“Yes.”

Megan touched her hand very briefly. The contact was vaguely reassuring to Rhoda, as if the touch of another sympathetic human being helped make the world that much safer for her.

“You poor kid. What happened?”

She hesitated.

“I’m sorry, I’m just like that. Forgive me, Rhoda. I’m the nosiest girl in the state. When I ask personal questions, just slap my wrist and tell me to mind my own damned business.”

“No, I-”

“Because I don’t mean to pry.”

“It’s all right.” She sipped her wine, savoring the sharp, dry bite of the Chianti. She set the glass down on the table and closed her eyes. Her head swam pleasantly; evidently the wine was having more of an effect on her than she realized. “He ran around,” she said finally. “Other women.”

“He must be out of his mind.”

She looked up, startled.

“A girl like you,” Megan explained. “Any man married to a woman like you would have to be crazy to look at another girl. Maybe you don’t know it, Rhoda, but you’re a beautiful woman.”

Unconsciously, she felt herself blushing. She covered her nervousness first with another longer sip of Chianti, then by lighting a cigarette. She drew on the cigarette, took smoke deeply into her lungs, then blew it out in a long thin column that hung hazily together as it floated toward the ceiling. Her eyes followed the column of smoke while it rose. Then they dropped to fix on the base of the wine bottle.

“I don’t know whose fault it was,” she said. “I…it was a big mistake from the beginning, the whole thing. I met him and he gave me a big rush and proposed, and I managed to fool myself into thinking I was in love with him.”

“That happens.”

“I guess I made it easy. I was all alone here in New York. I didn’t know anybody. And family, not here or anywhere else. He was nice to me, and he was successful and good-looking and he wanted to marry me, and I managed to talk myself into being in love with him.”