One child was ridiculous—it meant you’d started too late, waited too long, were too attached and involved, too overprotective. You were setting yourself up for a thankless career of intervening when he got picked on at recess, driving him to school because the bus made him nervous, calling the teacher for extra conferences, spending too much money on birthday parties, and hassling other parents to let their children come over because you were worried he was lonely with only you for company.  Two was better, but still a bit precious, and if they happened to fight constantly, there was no extra person around to smooth over differences. Three was perfect, but only if you spaced them far enough apart so you didn’t go out of your mind with too many toddlers at once, yet close enough together that you hadn’t burned out completely by the time the youngest hit kindergarten. Four was simply too many, no question about that. You were practically begging for one of them to be defective in some way—late to toilet train, needing extra help with reading, unattractive or unathletic or simply inferior to the other three.

In my immediate circle of friends, we eschewed the gigantic vans some of our fellow parents espoused, preferring to squeeze our offspring into station wagons or even sedans. This meant that there could be no more than one child requiring a car seat at any given time. By twelve, a child could sit in front with you; in our town, where traffic was sparse, it was considered acceptable to let a few teammates whom you were picking up as a favor goof around in the back of the station wagon while you carefully drove the six or seven blocks home.

Our houses were neither so grand nor so formidable as those of our neighbors. We employed no lawn services, and our hedges, as a result, were often a little ratty. When the leaf-collecting machines came around every fall, our lawns were the ones still dotted with colorful flotsam. We had dogs, and we cleaned up after them when they relieved themselves in someone else’s yard, but our own grass was always a bit spotty. While we hired people to clean our gutters, we washed our own windows (this was something the children were delighted to help with) and tended our own hedges on the first warm days of spring and the last cool days of fall, so we could greet our fellow townsmen who passed by at regular intervals on bicycles or on the sidewalk, in pairs.

Not all our children’s ages lined up exactly. Still, there was always someone to cozy up to at a basketball game or winter performance in the new high school auditorium; always someone you could call to pick your kid up from band practice or drop off at the athletic field in a pinch, knowing you’d be asked to do the same thing within a short time. If you’d volunteered to help with the fourth-grade math festival and the baby suddenly got sick, it was easy to find a substitute. If your daughter called you at work desperate that she’d left her lunchbox on the kitchen table, it was comforting to know several parents—and in our town, these were not only so-called stay-at-home mothers, but also professors, filmmakers, restaurant owners, even a famous novelist—who slept late or worked from home and certainly wouldn’t mind swinging by your house, hunting down the extra keys in the garage, and stopping off at school on the way to the grocery store. Of course, it helped that our town was so small that nothing was out of the way. You could live at one end, near the commuter train tracks, and be at a dinner party by the entrance to the turnpike in five minutes. If you jogged, you were spotted by practically everyone you knew as you ran your usual two- or three-mile route through the streets.

Jogging aside, we saw quite a bit of each other—for one thing, there were plenty of forgotten lunchboxes. We were not perfectly on top of our kids’ academic and athletic lives, unlike people we knew who had schedules tacked to their bulletin boards and seemed, in our minds, to run unnecessarily tight ships. We were mutually reassured by one another’s flightiness. As adults and parents, we saw ourselves as practically interchangeable. When little Marco Falstaff forgot his mummy costume the morning of the Halloween parade and called his mother Julia’s work number in tears, Julia simply called Heidi Waring at home. Heidi was bringing cupcakes to the classroom and could drop the costume off, no problem. At school, after painting cat whiskers on her daughter Georgia’s cheeks, Heidi helped Marco wrap gauze around his sweat suit, pinning the ends so they’d trail for a spooky effect. Then she stayed for the parade. Later, Julia laughed and struck just the appropriate note of chagrin—she was a terrible mother, not like Heidi, who knew the proper way to pin gauze to sweat suits. On Halloween night, little Marco followed Heidi around adoringly and wanted to trick-or-treat holding her hand. We all heard about it the following weekend, when Marco chose to sit with Heidi instead of his parents at his big sister’s fifth-grade soccer championship.

In the magazines we read and the newspapers we subscribed to, the years spent at home with small children were often depicted as lonely and bland. But in our town we saw each other virtually every weekend and several nights during the week. We shopped at the same co-op grocery and ran into each other at the grubby pizza parlor when we took a night off from cooking supper. Every winter the fire department flooded one of the athletic fields by the high school, which then froze and became our skating rink for as long as the ice lasted. There were pumpkin-carving parties and benefit concerts and movie nights in summer on the public-library lawn. We spread out quilts and settled down, passing juice boxes to the babies and paper cups of wine to each other, as the fireflies winked in the bushes and the older kids goofed around, first loudly, then quietly, in the deeper shadows under the trees.

In our town, fall was completely given over to soccer. We attended our children’s games faithfully—never mind that we sometimes brought along a shaker of martinis that we surreptitiously shared, or that we always sat a little bit behind the other parents, who eagerly crowded the sidelines. It was at one of these games that I saw Tom Donaldson, who lived three blocks away from us, touch Laura McNally, whose son Samuel had just scored a goal, in such a way that it was suddenly absolutely clear to me that the two of them had been to bed together.

It wasn’t much—his hand on her shoulder, a little squeeze to acknowledge the goal—but the look she gave him, the way they held each other’s gaze, bespoke their intimacy. I felt the hairs on my forearms prickle. Laura’s husband, Andy, stood halfway down the field, intent on the game, while Tom’s wife, Fiona, talked to our coach under a scarlet maple a few yards away. Tom and Laura stood next to one another, so close that it must have required conscious effort—a preternatural awareness of the other person’s body—for their hands not to touch. I remembered that feeling from long ago: sitting next to a potential boyfriend on the sofa, casually letting your hand slide down by your side, a force-field of heat and anticipation in the eternal seconds his hand hovered beside yours, before he daringly extended a single finger, then another, then grasped your hand, intertwining his fingers with yours, and turned you toward him for a kiss.

A few seconds later the ball careened out of bounds at Tom’s feet, and he and Laura sidestepped the players who tumbled after, laughing. Then it was halftime and Fiona brought a plastic bowl of grapes and cut oranges to our sweaty children, who were losing 3–1 to a team they’d beaten earlier in the season and stood around dejectedly eating grapes instead of hamming it up with orange wedges jammed into their smiles the way they did when they were winning. I moved closer to my own husband, considering Laura McNally. She was a couple of years older than I and certainly no raving beauty. Her hair was dark and wiry—it frizzed in bad weather—and her thighs were, frankly, fat. As if in defiance or obliviousness, she wore jeans that were too tight, and I’d seen her in a bikini—she shouldn’t have worn a bikini—at the pool. She was also a little standoffish. Since she and Andy had moved here, she’d certainly accepted more invitations than she’d issued. Andy was the more affable member of the couple. He was funny and self-deprecating and sweet to his three kids, same ages as mine, who were decent in school and at sports but didn’t distinguish themselves in any real way.

After the game, I stayed to clean up. Tom Donaldson offered to help me, so we gathered up the orange peels as the coaches stuffed practice balls back into their mesh bags and our team gorged on post-game donut holes and chased each other around the field. When we finished, Tom turned to me, touched my arm exactly as he’d touched Fiona’s, and smiled.

Something lit up in my blood, and I felt my face get hot. I had seen this man a million times, had helped his children into their jackets and tied their cleats and lent my favorite cashmere cardigan to his wife. Across the field, kids were shrieking, squirting each other with the dregs of their water bottles. Tom started toward home, and I stood in the middle of the soccer field still feeling the softness of his palm—a softness tempered by the roughness of a callus just below his wedding ring—against my skin. My heart dropped into my stomach in a way I’d forgotten could happen. This man, this husband and father of three, was sleeping with someone outside his marriage. I imagined his soft, callused hands on Laura McNally, and from there it was easy work to imagine them on me. Did he pull her to him all of a sudden, out of some finally uncontrollable impulse one fateful day, or was their original encounter planned? Had they pined? Was their first kiss a drunken one at a party, perhaps at my very own house, in the dark, on the deck, by the coat closet under the stairs? Were their children in the next room, innocently playing while their parents kissed with their coats on in the foyer?

Later that night, as I imagined that my husband’s mouth on my body was Tom Donaldson’s mouth, I turned the possibilities over and over in my mind. You could meet your lover in an out-of-the-way grocery store, and if no one were around, you could grope him in the car. Taking the children to a movie and then allowing them, as a special treat, to sit way down in front meant you could pass a couple of hours with your hand on someone’s inflamed and inflammatory knee. And there were all sorts of accidental encounters that would be simple to orchestrate: the library, the doctor’s office, the school trip you both agreed to chaperone. You might offer to have someone’s child over when your spouse was out of town, and arrange for that child’s father to pick his offspring up on his way home from work. If the children were playing nicely upstairs, there would be no reason to disrupt them right away. You might fix a couple of drinks and sit next to one another on the sofa for a few moments. You might touch his forearm affectionately as you laughed at something he said, and absently twirl a lock of your hair around your finger while you told a story. You might drink a sip from his glass if yours was empty. Of course, no one in our town actually did these things, as far as I knew. But suddenly I realized that they could be done.

Monday morning, I woke after a series of vivid and compromising dreams. Sarah, the baby, was in bed with us; when I turned my head, expecting to see my husband on his pillow next to mine, her fat, sweet-smelling face intervened.

Breakfast was cooked, eaten, and cleaned up. The older children gathered their backpacks and filed off to their buses. I put Sarah in her car seat and we drove to collect Emma Middleton’s daughter Isabel; after dropping the girls at preschool, I decided to go for a bracing walk in the gorge near the commuter train tracks. I thought about Tom Donaldson until my breath caught in my throat; then I thought about Geoff Rivers, and Gerhard Schmidt, and the other men—married men, fathers—whom I saw nearly every day of my life.

Geoff was bald and had a slightly feminine figure, but he had a sweet smile and watery blue eyes, plus an eagerness to please that meant he laughed at my jokes and always sought me out. Gerhard was a bore in person but came alive on a computer screen; he had sent several amusing emails, which had inspired witty rejoinders and drawn all of us together, during last year’s school-board crisis. Jack Middleton was very tall, and a doctor. Once, when I had a sore throat, and complained about it at a party, he held my face in his hands and looked intently at me while he gently felt the glands in my neck to see whether or not they were swollen.

All around me the leaves sifted slowly to the ground. Soon the woods would be bare, and soccer would end. All over town husbands and wives would make fires and go to bed early—and then what? Did they kiss hotly before commencing what I had heard several wives jokingly refer to as their marital obligations? Our town was the size of a college; in college, sex had been all we talked about. We knew who slept with whom and how often and who was waiting in the wings to make a move. Now there were occasional jokes about libidos that didn’t match—husbands who wanted sex when wives were nursing and exhausted, for example—and sisterly advice was given about when it was reasonable to expect one’s libido to return after childbirth. Sometimes someone mentioned a drunken, passionate night—usually it was referred to as the night little so-and-so was conceived—but for the most part, I realized, we married women were as quiet on the topic of sex as nuns.

Fall was colder than usual, and the rink froze early, in November. Gerhard Schmidt dragged his charcoal grill down to the perimeter so we could roast marshmallows and grill hot dogs on weekend nights. We had whisky in flasks for us and hot chocolate in thermoses for the kids, and when the surface of the ice got too chipped and dented, the fire department would drive over and flood the field so it froze smooth again. After Thanksgiving, the Christmas parties began. We had one, and the Middletons had another, and for a while nearly every weekend was an excuse to dress nicely and let the kids stay up late and head to someone’s house for holiday cheer. We all went to these parties on foot—not only because it meant we could drink as much as we wanted but also because it struck us as quaint and charming. It was the town rule that all sidewalks be shoveled promptly when the snow stopped falling, so there was always a nice little track amid the drifts beside the street. In the moonlight, the snow glowed blue, and it was silent and lovely among the bare trees. No one remembered which family had started the trend of piling a wagon with blankets to transport the drowsy children to and from parties, but now we all did. If nothing else, we figured our kids would have delightful memories of being towed crookedly home, the winter stars blazing in the sky, the moonlight bright upon the snowy yards of their childhood friends.

I kept my eyes and ears peeled for news, or evidence, of Laura and Tom’s affair. They were everywhere we went. At Gerhard and Anja Schmidt’s party, I stood with my back to the fireplace, feeling my skirt and stockings get hot as Andy told one amusing story after another. Laura stayed in the background while her garrulous husband held court, and though she was often in the room, it was somehow always difficult to approach her. She never stood at the counter and chatted with the rest of us when someone mixed drinks. She grew quieter as the room grew louder, and unless you made a point of looking, you might not notice she was there at all.

Andy drew her into things, but the minute his attention lapsed, she slipped away from him. When someone turned the music up, he found her and insisted they dance. Was it my imagination, or did she hesitate a bit, looking around the room for Tom even as she allowed herself to be pulled forward by her husband, who always convinced two or three couples to join them after we pushed the sofa and coffee table and chairs to the perimeter of the room? Andy was a good dancer, and he spun Laura away and back so that her hair flew and her skirt billowed. She was flushed, laughing, as pretty as she ever looked. And then she’d find an excuse to leave—to check on the children, to carry a tray of empty glasses to the kitchen, to duck into the bathroom—and never return.

So I took to dancing with Andy after she left. I felt sorry for him, and my own husband was never much for dancing. If Laura was in the kitchen with Tom Donaldson, I didn’t want Andy to notice. And Andy seemed happy to dance with me. He twirled me until I felt weightless. After a few songs, the room would grow stuffy, someone would fling open a door, and icy tendrils of air would slip in among the dancers. Then the mood would change, and the party would slow down. The host and hostess would soon close the door again—the outside air made the fireplace smoke—and we would round up our children, hunt for their coats and boots and mittens, and say our thank yous and good-byes.

It felt old-fashioned to bundle up in mufflers and wrap the children in blankets and put them in the wagons. The walk home was lovely and invigorating. My husband, after we put the children into their beds, was ardent. And I thought of Laura and Tom, and how frustrating it must be for them to meet at these parties again and again, in the company of their children and friends and spouses, and not to be able to act upon the passion that had seized them and taken them out of their ordinary lives.

That winter I slept poorly, and I lay in bed beside my husband, who breathed on me until I nudged him and he rolled heavily over, muttering in his sleep.

Lying in the dark, I worried about the usual things: chores I’d forgotten, relatives I’d neglected, financial matters I’d failed to attend to, and I swore to reform my ways once the sun came up. And then, as the sky lightened and sleep finally claimed me, I drifted into a strange place. Instead of worrying over tiny things, I suddenly saw my life entire.

I loved my children with a passion that astonished me. I loved our town, though I knew perfectly well it was small and insular. I loved my husband, who was handsome, devoted, and still, somehow, enthralling. When I looked at him, I saw the dashing boy I’d staked everything on when we were young. Years ago I’d wanted nothing more than to marry him. It had taken every ounce of self-control to conceal my feelings, and I’d waited for him to tire of a demanding ex-girlfriend, overcome his reluctance to move in together, and finally decide he was ready, as he put it, to sacrifice his other options. Now, as he slept beside me, I remembered those terrifying months in which I’d longed for what we—what everyone—now had. In our wedding photos, dressed in formal clothes with our parents and friends arrayed around us, I glowed with triumph.

In my experience, courtship was treacherous, worrisome, and fraught. Marriage, I felt, was solemn and exhilarating. It therefore came as a shock to see that, among our friends, marriage was consistently treated as a joke. Husbands were scoffed at for their cluelessness, lumped together, constantly (though affectionately) mocked. The husbands weren’t much help. In our town, the women took reasonable care of themselves, though we cultivated an insouciance that forbade making, or seeming to make, much of an effort. But our husbands were a different story. They wore unflattering clothes and were prone to unfortunate haircuts. Some of them were balding, and others were short, and while this was certainly not their fault, they seemed genuinely oblivious. We, on the other hand, got highlights twice a year and even had our eyebrows waxed from time to time. We got pedicures. We perused catalogues. We knew our flaws and camouflaged them as best we could.

At the swim club, our husbands were pale and potbellied, hairy in unattractive places. They affected baseball caps, which were, we felt, silly and juvenile. Even the handsomer husbands could have vastly improved things by making just a small effort to spruce themselves up. Gerhard Schmidt was slim and Nordic in his bathing trunks, but his earlobes sprouted an astonishing crop of blonde hair. Jack Middleton was bony and covered with moles. And their voices! They sneezed loudly, slapped each other on the back, clipped cellular telephones to the waists of their khaki pants, and talked with their mouths full. At night, in bed, they kept us awake with their snoring.

That winter, with my own husband softly snoring by my side, I tried to imagine younger versions of the Middletons or the Sassos, with their sensibly cut hair, their braying laughs, and their nondescript clothing. What had happened to the passionate couples they must once have been? At some faraway point, one of them had decided life was not worth living without the other. Someone had made a desperate declaration of love, and someone else had accepted, and now they, like everyone else, slept in a bed with matching sheets and pillowcases and a box of tissues next to the alarm clock on the bedside table. Passion had brought us all multi-story houses with yards that required raking and seeding and mowing, cars that must be insured, and children who needed to be driven here and there.

Marriage was a tiny medieval kingdom. There were vassals and serfs to be supervised, taxes and tributes to be paid, properties to be overseen, rebellions to be put down, plagues to be managed. It bore no resemblance to the teenaged fantasy of grown-up love, where sex and mutual adoration prevailed. So if Laura and Tom craved something less permanent and ponderous than the lives we had all fallen into simply by doing what we were expected to do, if they opted for a momentary respite, something both lighter and more serious than what we all woke up to every day, who could blame them? I turned my pillow over, and laid my cheek where it was cool. Soon it would be morning. Our alarm would ring and we would rouse ourselves in a predictable order. My husband would kiss me on his way to his car. The children would bicker and fail to clear their cereal bowls and race each other to the bus stop, while I stood blissfully forgotten in the doorway. It was Emma Middleton’s day to pick Sarah up for nursery school; after they left I would have nearly three whole hours to myself. Emma would bundle Sarah into her car, waving cheerfully, just as the school bus groaned to a stop at the corner. The little Warings and Middletons and my children would leap jauntily up its steps. And I would wave, shut the door, wander up the stairs and down the hall to the bathroom, shrug off my bathrobe as the shower heated up, and step in, tilting my face into the running water.

Every year, at my husband’s particular insistence, we drove two hours into the country to chop down our own Christmas tree. This year, Sarah woke burning with fever the morning we had planned to go. I told my husband to go ahead and take the boys, that I would stay and tend to the baby as necessary. He looked relieved, and off they went.

Sarah fell asleep after lunch, and I decided to get our ornaments down from the attic and begin the laborious process of untangling the lights. Over the years, we had haphazardly amassed several containers of ornaments, most of them rather slapdash. There were some wooden animals I’d painted the year I was pregnant with Charlie, and a few souvenirs—a pinecone owl we’d bought in Maine on a whim, a set of tin snowflakes from a shop in Italy that were Theo’s particular favorite to hang. Very few ornaments were made of anything you could not drop. The exception was a painted glass fish given to me when I was nine years old by my grandmother, which I always wrapped in cotton wool and stored in its original cardboard box. Every year I carefully nestled the box among its fellow ornaments in a cookie tin, which guaranteed that its contents would be cushioned and safe.

Or so I thought. This year, when I opened the box and lifted the top layer of cotton, I found a wreck of silver splinters where the fish had been. There was no question of attempting a repair. The shards were tiny, some as small as needles. They glittered dangerously in their box.

You did not get where we were in life with many heirlooms intact. At every dinner party someone fumbled one of my mother-in-law’s crystal goblets; nearly all our wedding china was chipped. Even the sterling silver baby cup that had been my mother’s, then mine, and then each of my children’s in turn, was dented all over, the natural result of having been flung from a wooden high chair over the course of three generations. I had figured that at some point the ornament would be knocked from the tree by our dog’s wagging tail, or slip through a child’s chubby, well-intentioned fingers. There would be a moment of regret as its pieces were swept up and thrown away, but I lived my life prepared for small accidents. The loss of the ornament itself was not important, but I was deeply unnerved by the secret circumstances of its breaking.

How long had the fish been wrecked without our knowledge, its shattered pieces carefully wrapped, its box and batting perfectly intact? I folded the cotton back over the ruined ornament and closed the box before hiding it among the kitchen trash. Our tree was perpetually crowded, and my children’s sense of ritual, while sturdy, was not overly specific. If the gilded star we fixed to the top of the tree disappeared, they would complain, and each child felt proprietary toward ornaments he or she had made, but the fish was mine alone. Its absence would be noticed by no one but me.

Suddenly it was the New Year, and things slowed down. School started, the flu hit, and a cold snap sent us all into hibernation. The telephone rang—at one point so many children had the flu that basketball practice was cancelled for a week—but no one visited, and no parties took place. I was lonely, and I could only think how much lonelier I would be if I were harboring a secret passion for Tom Donaldson, whom I was unable to meet.

By February the whole town had recovered, and life started up again. There were basketball playoffs in the evenings, school projects to help with, classroom parties in honor of Valentine’s Day to plan and attend. Emma Middleton appeared on my doorstep one morning looking pale and thin—they’d had the flu as well—so I made coffee and we decided to kill the morning gossiping until it was time to get the babies from nursery school. Something was in the air, I could tell, but Emma waited while I poured coffee, heated milk, and slathered four slices of toast with butter and jam. When I finally sat down, she leaned forward eagerly and began to talk.

The news she bore was stunning: Gerhard Schmidt had gone to Denmark at Christmas to visit his elderly parents alone, and while there, he called Anja to ask for a divorce. Anja would get custody of their three, the house, and plenty of money as well. Gerhard had written separate letters to each child, inviting them to Denmark to meet their new stepmother. They were also welcome to spend school vacations and summers there at his expense.

Would Anja stay in our town now that her marriage was so spectacularly dismantled? Emma didn’t know. Julia Falstaff was Anja’s best friend, so we were sure to hear the real story eventually. We ate our toast and marveled at the vicissitudes of fate. It wasn’t until after Emma left, and I’d cleared and washed our coffee cups and wiped the counter absent-mindedly, that I realized I had completely forgotten to ask whether Tom and Fiona had been sick, too, or whether anyone had recently seen Laura and Andy.

The news about Gerhard and Anja shook everyone. You could hardly go to the co-op or to an indoor soccer game without talking about them, and the acceptable position to take quickly became clear. Anja was not well liked, but in her present misfortune everyone tacitly suspended criticism—she had always seemed aloof, but couldn’t that be a cultural thing? Weren’t Swedes supposed to be taciturn? In any case, wouldn’t Gerhard (who was, after all, Nordic as well) have known what he was getting into?

What was frustrating for everyone was Anja’s equanimity. We all made ourselves available, but, though we weren’t precisely rebuffed, neither were we taken into confidence. We expected her to lose or gain weight, to collapse on a sympathetic shoulder, to gather her children, sell her house, and move back to her family in Sweden. But Anja did nothing of the sort. Her three children made honor roll as usual and continued to be the high scorers at basketball games. Their uniforms were always clean, and Anja stood on the sidelines with us the way she always had. Heidi Waring even saw her in the post office one day, with a neat stack of boxes addressed to Gerhard in Denmark—his books, Anja explained calmly, which he had especially asked her to send. We wanted to help her through this terrible crisis, but we were reluctant to offer assistance when Anja herself acted as if no crisis had occurred.

And then, in March, Laura and Andy McNally disappeared.

News in our town traveled swiftly and invisibly, as when a teacher at the elementary school resigned mid-semester, and we knew all about it before the official letter from the district reached our mailboxes. Occasionally, a real scandal, like Gerhard and Anja’s separation, broke like a thunderclap over everyone at once. It therefore seemed absurd that none of us had the slightest idea what had happened to Laura and Andy. One day they were at home like everyone else, and the next day they were gone. Their children were absent, their house was silent, and their driveway was empty except for the morning paper, whose delivery no one had apparently bothered to stop.

We saw Margaret Sasso, who lived across the street from Laura and Andy, every day when we went to pick our children up from preschool. The school was unreachable by car; its sweet whitewashed building sat tucked away in a lovely corner of our town’s college campus. You had to cross a series of lawns and courtyards on foot to get there. We parked as close as we could and raced breathlessly—we were always running late—up the shallow hill to the school, where we stood together in front of the pretty wooden porch until dismissal, when the heavy oak doors swung open and our children, in their bright clothes and backpacks, stepped carefully down the stairs.

Our chitchat outside the preschool picked up and left off without ceremony, so that each day’s dialogue felt like part of a single protracted conversation. After Laura and Andy’s disappearance, we talked about nothing but them. Perhaps they’d left to tend to Andy’s parents, who were, Julia Falstaff confided, elderly and unwell. Darker justifications—the health of one of the children, a freak accident, something dreadful from the past returned to afflict them (no one could never agree what, exactly, this might be)—were invented, discussed, and eventually discarded.

As the days became weeks our concern began to curdle, slowly, into resentment. At this point it was inconsiderate, Heidi Waring finally said, not to have gotten in touch. Heidi’s daughter Georgia had wept when her birthday party came and went without Mariah McNally, and though Heidi had called several times, Laura and Andy’s home phone rang and rang, and their cellphones went straight to voicemail.

The blindness of my fellow citizens astounded me. Every day I watched Fiona Donaldson carefully, but her broad, blank face betrayed nothing. Surely she must eventually confess—either in grief, or in outrage—that her very husband was, by virtue of his affair with Laura, responsible for Laura and Andy’s sudden disappearance from our town. At night, when the children slept and my husband and I read in bed, I ached to tell him what I knew. I could picture his serious expression; I knew that whatever he said when I finished would soothe me. But a mysteriously familiar, if long-disused, reticence—it reminded me of the period just before our engagement, when I’d held myself sternly in check—forbade speaking, and I went to sleep night after night with my secret intact. Surely the following day Laura and Andy would return, or Tom and Fiona would separate, and the situation would become clear, at last, to all of us together.

It was a gorgeous spring. The campus paths we hurried along were lined with lilacs and cherry trees; as it did every year, an ancient, carefully pruned wisteria vine burst into bloom above the nursery school’s whitewashed porch. The weather held, day after day, and though we feigned reluctance, what with all the places we had to go and the errands we had to finish, we hung around the campus a little bit longer than necessary after school while our children entertained one another on the playground.

I did not mind dawdling, for the truth was that I found myself, inexplicably, rather at loose ends. My to-do list, I told Heidi Waring one day, was to-done; she laughed, but looked at me curiously, as if I had violated a taboo. Free time was not something any of us usually had, or if we did, we did not discuss it. The following week, I began walking to school, pushing Sarah’s empty stroller ahead of me. It was too beautiful to drive, I told everyone by way of justification, and I was alternately praised and teased for my deviation from routine.

The truth, which I kept to myself, was that I walked to school in order to use up time. My child-free mornings, those precious three-hour blocks between drop-off and pickup, suddenly felt intolerably long and vacant. At home, the clock crawled until it was plausibly time to leave, and even then I left early. On the way, it was all I could do to refrain from breaking into a run.

Walking with time to spare and nothing in particular to accomplish, I felt bizarrely hollow. Marriage and children rearranged one’s very molecules, it seemed; you adjusted to accommodate first the needs of your husband, then one child and another and finally another, as you crowded more events and more people into the limited hours of your day. In my tenure as a wife and mother, I had never felt terribly overburdened. I liked the way ordinary life often resembled a siege, and felt a thrill of pride at every small domestic crisis that was successfully overcome. Deep down I had known there would come a day when my responsibilities would invisibly lessen, just as they had invisibly accrued, but I had not stopped to consider the consequences. I felt bereft, and vaguely insubstantial, as if I had lost some critical item of ballast and was in danger of drifting out of reach.

I did not look forward to seeing my friends. The cheerful way we all greeted each other struck me as tiresome and saccharine. The stories we launched into day after day—the antics of our children and husbands, spun for hilarity—were, when it came right down to it, the exact same anecdotes we’d recited to each other for years. These days, when the conversation drifted inevitably to Laura and Andy’s absence, I had to bow my head to hide my irritation. All winter I had thought about Laura and Tom Donaldson’s affair, embroidering it as diligently as a royal tapestry. The version of events my friends chose to fixate on—where Laura and Andy had gone, what they were doing, when and why they might eventually come back—struck me as hopelessly dull and unimaginative, and I could not muster the enthusiasm necessary to join in. I wanted to know what dark bargains had been struck, what desperate scenes of passion and renunciation had taken place. I would have been happier to ponder the outcome of some grand gesture. A duel, perhaps, though I knew this was ridiculous. I wanted Laura and Tom’s affair to blaze like a sonnet, or a tale of chivalry, or an opera in which the protagonist murdered her lover, then went mad.

The day Laura and Andy came back, Laura must have dropped her youngest off after the preschool morning was well underway; in any case, she simply appeared at pickup without warning or explanation. I had imagined the scene that greeted me as I crested the hill, pushing my empty stroller, so many times that I felt I was a bit player in some well-known drama’s second act. There was the wicked adulteress, stage left, with her pale skin and witchy black hair. There was the noble wife, two spots of color high on her wronged and innocent cheeks. There were the townspeople, as huddled and superfluous as a Greek chorus, trying and failing to pull off various attitudes of indifference or unconcern. When the oak doors at the top of the preschool stairs swung open at twelve o’clock, I half expected to see Agamemnon’s murdered corpse instead of our troop of shiny-haired children.

Instead, never were preschoolers greeted so enthusiastically; never were their cardboard-and-construction paper offerings so lavishly praised. Never were their hooded jackets and backpacks so carefully and thoroughly zipped and fiddled with. By the time I settled Sarah into her stroller with a juice box, Laura and her daughter had already vanished. Something, clearly, had happened before my arrival—there was an anticipatory tension in the air, and my friends were already moving toward the playground, where Fiona stood looking ravaged and triumphant. Had she spoken sharply to Laura, made some comment or accusation within earshot of everyone else? Finally, we would find out the truth. And yet I found myself rooted to the ground, reluctant to leave my customary spot, where I had stood at noon every day for 10 years, waiting for one or another of my children to emerge.

Ten years! It was impossible to contemplate, and yet it was true. In fact, this spring marked the end of it; Sarah would start kindergarten in the fall. It was, I realized as I looked around, the final year of preschool for most of us—the youngest children of the Sassos and the Warings and the Middletons were all headed to kindergarten as well. Never again would we all meet in the flowery environs of the nursery school. Instead, our children would be removed each morning by the fleet of familiar orange buses, and every afternoon they would be delivered home. I imagined that the domestic drama Fiona was about to reveal might eclipse the significance of our final spring as drop-off parents together, and I was right.

Fiona, it transpired, had suspected nothing until Tom, weepy and repentant, broke the news to her one terrible night. It was the very night Laura and Andy left town, and they’d disappeared because Laura had originally left by herself, intending to stay with her sister indefinitely. But Andy had followed her with their children and refused to depart until she agreed to come back. This detail was endlessly parsed in thousands of subsequent conversations. We could all see walking away from our houses and husbands. Heidi Waring joked that she thought about it nearly every day. But what kind of mother, we asked one another, would consider abandoning her children?

Naturally Tom and Fiona went to marriage counseling. We heard about every session from Fiona herself. Divorce, she told us again and again, was not an option. Provided Tom confessed every detail of his clandestine affair with Laura, reconciliation—though it would take work, Fiona said, and trust, and a good deal of time—must inevitably occur. Those of us who hankered for the precise details of the affair were sorely disappointed; Fiona preferred to focus on larger issues. Did Tom still, or had he ever, truly loved Laura? Had he loved her more than he loved Fiona, more than he loved his children? For several sessions, she told us, Fiona and her therapist wondered whether Laura was mostly responsible for the affair; eventually, they debated whether a spouse who strayed (this was Fiona’s preferred locution, as if Tom were a puppy who had wandered absently off leash) could ever prove trustworthy again.

It would have been unseemly and impolite to grill Fiona on the specifics. We took what little information we got, and picked over it in private like scavengers disemboweling a carcass. This, I realized, was not a generous way to think about my friends, whose curiosity was evidently whetted by Fiona’s evasiveness. Anja’s forthright acceptance of Gerhard’s mistress had made the whole matter of her divorce no fun at all to gossip about; besides, you could hardly feel scandalized about an episode of adultery that took place on another continent. But Laura and her family were known and continued to walk among us. The more Fiona revealed, the more mysterious Laura and Andy came to seem. We had no idea what steps, if any, they were taking to repair the damage done to their marriage by Laura’s infidelity. We saw them only at a distance, and much less frequently than we had in the past.

That spring in school, my son Charlie was studying the Etruscans; for weeks he worked on a diorama meant to re-create one of their painted tombs. It was clear from Charlie’s rapt silence as he worked, and from the jaded look he gave the rest of us whenever he had been deep in his project for an afternoon, that he had fallen in love with the Etruscans, as some children become besotted with Egypt, or ancient Greece, or Camelot. I knew he was only half with us, that his other life—his real life, in a way, a life lived apart from the drab world of parents and schoolwork and polite conversation at mealtimes—was elsewhere, amid the ruined necropolises of ancient Etruria.

Occasionally he let the odd fact about the Etruscans drop. The Etruscans had flourished from the seventh to the first century B.C.; they were the original Italians, Charlie told me, and like the Egyptians, they took great care with their dead. No one could read their language; what little we knew about them came mostly from their tombs. The one Charlie was busy re-creating had been found below the village of Tarquinia, and was called The Tomb of Hunting and Fishing. It was, he told me proudly, one of the most famous tombs ever discovered.

The tomb’s walls were richly painted; Charlie spent hours painstakingly copying their decoration from a book he left propped open on the dining-room table. The first chamber depicted a banquet; in the next, a pair of boys were shown scampering up a hillside in order to swim. Finally there were the hunters and fishermen, painted amid swooping birds and leaping dolphins in great abundance. Everyone, from the fishermen to the archers to the lithe and supple youth diving into the sea, wore an expression Charlie informed me was known as the archaic smile. It was a fixed and intransigent expression of beauty, meant to evoke a timeless and transcendent personal bliss. The paintings themselves were suffused with happiness. The fishermen’s nets were intact and beautifully draped; the hunters’ arrows were well aimed and cleanly shot. Even the birds and dolphins were complicit; they did not look doomed, any more than the half-clad hunters appeared menacing or predatory. Each painting had something of the archaic smile’s enchanting inscrutability, and its ability to attract and confound at once. All in all, the tomb’s loveliness was quite beyond your reach; it was a dream of human joy that surpassed anything you knew.

One night, as I was putting him to bed, Charlie told me a story. Though local shepherds had known that the earth beneath Tarquinia was honeycombed with tombs, and had even used those that were exposed as sheepfolds and henhouses, there had been plenty of burial chambers that had been hidden and undisturbed. One day, when a stone removed to fix a nearby road revealed a massive slab that could only be the roof of yet another tomb, a visiting archaeologist decided to excavate the site. What he saw when the slab was lifted away seemed at first as if it must have been a hallucination. Below, in a richly painted chamber, lay the intact body of an Etruscan nobleman clad in full armor. But the moment fresh air and light flooded the tomb, the body and its armor collapsed and crumbled to dust. While the archaeologist watched helplessly, even the vibrant paintings on the walls began, visibly, to fade.

There were things that could not withstand the light of day, the freshness of air; things that kept their shape only in darkness. I did not find it shocking that Laura and Tom had fallen in love. Their passion was a ravishing secret, like an Etruscan warrior lying intact for centuries in a tomb underneath the plains of Tarquinia. To have your affair crumble to dust, to have the walls that once surrounded you, walls painted with carmine birds and emerald fish and cerulean skies, fade and disintegrate when exposed made perfect sense. For your language to fall into obsolescence seemed inevitable. But to come back from the Etruscan dark to the bright Italian sun, to climb out and behave yourself alongside everyone else, never again to speak that cryptic language that only you and one other knew fluently? I could not imagine it.

Charlie’s bedroom was warm; in the faint glow from the hallway his features reclaimed, as all children’s do in sleep, the innocent semblance of his infant self. Downstairs, my husband was waiting for me. I stroked Charlie’s hair and steadied myself against a feeling I remembered from my first days of motherhood, when a surfeit of love and exhaustion made me fear that everything might vanish in an instant, that the life I inhabited could, through no fault or intention of my own, fall cruelly away. It had seemed a miracle every morning that the ground under my feet, the sky overhead, the child in my arms, all remained.

This foolishness would pass—it always had. I held myself still a moment while Charlie slept, and then I rose, kissed his cheek, and took my rightful place in the bright and superficial world.