material. This surprised him because whenever they socialized with his colleagues, she was imaginative and playful with their children. It made him happy and proud. But later she'd say, “I love to be with them, and then I love to leave them with their parents.” When she passed her thirty-fifth birthday, Andrew began to resign himself to childlessness.
Then she left him. Now, he'd learned, she was pregnant.
It was hard to know which had been more of a surprise. Or more painful.
He finished his tea, laced on his boots, grabbed his day pack, and headed north along a single-track lane above the farm. After a half mile or so, he turned left onto the path that led down through Minster Wood to the footbridge over the Valency where Lee had left him at the day before. He was headed for St. Juliot's, an isolated parish church the young architect Thomas Hardy had restored before he became a novelist and poet.
Andrew hadn't seen the end coming. Yes, Kat had been distant for some weeks, but he put that down to mourning: Her mother, a lifelong smoker, had died of lung cancer three months earlier. Katerina had grown quiet, distracted, and cold—not that she'd ever been especially passionate, come to that. When she announced she was leaving, one Saturday just before the end of the spring term, he had been so stunned, so utterly blind-sided, he'd simply stared at her. He felt poleaxed.
“When?” he'd finally said.
“Today. Now. I've already packed my car. My lawyer will contact you. Don't worry; I don't want anything that's yours.”
But Andrew was still back at the leaving.
“Why?”
She looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. “You really don't have a clue, do you?”
His forehead furrowed, as if he was puzzling out a design problem.
“I'm sorry; no, I don't.” And he didn't.
“I can't believe I have to spell this out for you.”
He stared at her, and what went through his head was that he thought being her husband warranted at least an explanation. Then she unloaded.
“Look, I want to spend my life with a man who wants to make a mark on the world. You call yourself an architect. But what do you actually do? You sit in your tidy, minimalist university studio and develop abstract notions about shape and form and space. You lecture to your doting students. You write papers for scholarly journals. I used to think it was great to be ‘Mrs. Professor Stratton,’ until I realized how dull your life is. Our life is. Tell me something, Mr. Architect: Where are your clients? Where are your buildings? Where are your muddy construction sites? Not to mention that you could be making ten times as much as they pay you at that damned university.”
“I guess I'm just not that interested in money,” he'd said. “And I don't see what this has to do with money, anyway.”
“Everything has to do with money, but that's not even the point. The point is, you have no passion; it's like you have ice in your veins instead of blood.”
“That's not true; I love working with my students—”
“And here's the saddest thing.” She was on a roll now. “You don't even know this is a lousy way to live! You don't even know you're only half alive. You know what being half alive means? That you're also half dead! And I'm dying being here with you. That's why I'm leaving!”
Andrew had heard some of this before, but never delivered with such fury. He didn't understand how, suddenly, his profession had become a reason for leaving. He didn't understand how being good at what he did was now a fault. He didn't understand how the Ice Queen could tell him he was passionless. He listened stoically, as he sometimes did at faculty meetings when one of his more “artistic” colleagues went on a rant. He breathed slowly to calm himself in the face of Kat's verbal flame throwing.
“Have you arranged someplace to stay?” he asked when Katerina finally flared out.
She stared at him in disbelief, then abruptly stood.
“I am so out of here,” she said.
And then she was.
Andrew and Kat lived in an early-nineteenth-century brick row house—three windows across, three stories high—on Delancey Street. Andrew had spent years renovating the old house, turning its stacked warren of dark, cramped rooms into a flowing, light-filled, contemporary space. An inventive cook, he'd built himself a sleek commercial-grade kitchen on the ground floor—an oasis of stainless steel and marble that opened to a