They’d met the way couples met nowadays, online, paired up because they were both self-proclaimed book nerds, both seeking a stable monogamous relationship without kids. He’d been married before, just after college, for three years. It had been an amicable divorce (according to Alan) and there hadn’t been any children. He said he had no idea what his ex-wife was even doing with her life now—they’d lost touch completely.

Alan and Martha, after a few introductory texts, had met for dinner, Alan driving to Portsmouth from his home outside of Scarborough in Maine. The best part about dinner that night—besides the truffle fries—was that there were no awkward silences. Alan was chatty, and funny, and unselfconscious. Martha didn’t exactly feel romantic stirrings, but she did have fun. And later that night she told herself that having fun while eating in a restaurant with a strange man was no small thing. She hadn’t dated anyone in more than ten years. And she hadn’t had sex for five years, not since a brief and awkward coupling at her fifteen-year college reunion. So she told herself to say yes to Alan Peralta, yes to further dinner dates, yes to sex if that was something he was interested in, yes to being in a relationship with him.

And that was what she did. She kept saying yes. It wasn’t hard to do. Alan was very sweet, easy to be with. Yeah, he made a lot of dumb jokes, but he knew they were dumb. And when they eventually got around to having sex, that part was nice, too. She wasn’t exactly attracted to Alan, who was raw and bony with deep-set eyes, but he had a grace about him, and at least he didn’t want to do anything strange in bed, except for some occasional dirty talk whispered into her ear.

Martha would have been happy to simply stay in a committed relationship, but Alan’s mother was a strict Catholic, and the most important person in Alan’s life, so during a weekend away to Kennewick on the southern shore of Maine, Alan lowered himself to a knee while they were on a cliffside walk and asked Martha to marry him. It was a moment that Martha had long believed would never happen to her, any kind of proposal, let alone such an old-fashioned one, and she had been filled with a surge of gratitude and love that propelled her to tell him yes right away. Toward the end of the trip, however, Alan said that he’d noticed she’d been quieter since the proposal, and she’d had to admit that he was right.

“Maybe it feels too sudden,” she said. “Give me one week.”

As it happened, Alan was traveling for the next week and Martha spent that time thinking about her decision. She did love him, she believed, although she wondered if she was truly in love with him. He had never really raised her pulse. And she had never yearned for him when he was away. But she realized that those two negatives, even the phrasing of them, were clichés about romantic love, and not necessarily based in reality. She loved his company. They could talk to one another. He smelled nice. And one thing she kept coming back to was a moment when they had first been casually dating, an evening in Portsmouth, when they were taking a stroll after dinner out. They’d been walking side by side along a dark sidewalk. It wasn’t raining, but it had rained all day and there were still puddles on the streets, and the occasional drip of water from gutters and trees. At one point during the walk they approached a section of the sidewalk where water was still falling in a steady flow from a large hotel awning. Without slowing down Alan had slid his hand around Martha’s waist and guided her smoothly away from the dripping water. Gallantry, but with the grace of a dance move, and Martha still remembered the tiny shiver that had coursed through her body when he’d touched her.

And maybe that was more important than yearning, just having someone looking out for you in small ways. Yearning never lasted anyway. Kindness did.

Martha said yes to Alan when he returned from his trip. She told herself she wouldn’t be completely giving up her independent life. Alan traveled so much for work that she’d have plenty of time alone.

They honeymooned in London, Alan making a list of pubs he wanted to visit (he had a passion for beer), and Martha was happy to go along. Toward the end of that trip they’d visited an elegant Victorian pub during a rainy afternoon, Martha studying her Fodor’s travel guide while Alan leaned against the elaborate bar chatting with the bartender. She watched him, his loud American voice at odds with the quiet man behind the bar, noting the way that Alan won over the reluctant Brit, who was now smiling and giving Alan tastes of the different beers they had on cask. It was at this moment that Martha had two competing thoughts. One, that she’d married a nice man. And, two, that he was a complete and utter stranger to her. She realized she didn’t really know him any better now than she had after that first date, when she’d returned home to her two-bedroom house in Portsmouth and decided that if Alan wanted to see her again, she’d agree.

A year later, and there were some days Martha never thought of her husband. And some days he was all she seemed to think about.

It was natural, she supposed. Even though she was thirty-nine she was still a newlywed, married less than a year. She actually hated the word “newlywed,” or hated other people saying it, like Donna from the library, who called her “the newlywed” in a wink-wink kind of way for about six months after she and Alan were married. Martha preferred the phrase “newly married,” but however you said it, that was what she was, a newly wedded person, with all that that implied.

On the days she didn’t think much about him it was because of how seamlessly he’d slid into her life. Alan was a careful and predictable man, and Martha had a careful and predictable life. On the days she thought about him, it was because there was something inexplicable about his presence, something that nagged at her. Back in high school and all through college Martha had kept a journal that was entirely made up of passages from books she loved, and poems that she would copy out in her tight cursive handwriting. She spent hours transcribing in her journal, and every once in a while she would come across a word, a word she knew well, that would suddenly not make any sense. She’d be convinced it was spelled wrong, or completely made-up by the poet or author. This never happened with a word like “crepuscular,” but always with a simple word like “apron.” Suddenly she’d be staring at it and the word would make absolutely no sense. That was what Alan was like, a plain even-tempered man who sometimes made no sense.

He was away right now, on a business trip to Denver. She thought of them as business trips, but that implied breakfast meetings and decision-making and men and women in suits. Alan was really a traveling salesman, maybe the last traveling salesman in the modern world, Martha sometimes thought. He did wear suits when he went to conventions, but that was so he could wear one of his ties that were for sale. He sold novelty clothing items at teachers’ conferences. Not just ties, but also buttons, and silk scarves for the female teachers. He sold T-shirts as well, and vests. Most of what he sold was math-and science-related. Ties decorated with the periodic table, buttons that celebrated Pi Day. Even though he never brought his merchandise home—he owned a storage unit in Newington—she’d seen a bunch of it just a month ago when she’d gone to visit him at a local high school math teachers’ conference. He’d been wearing his uniform—the dark pants, the white shirt—but he’d also been wearing suspenders filled up with funny buttons, and a red tie with the times table on it. Before they’d gone to lunch, she watched him sell a young female teacher a T-shirt that read math teachers aren’t mean. they’re above average.

Maybe she thought more about him when he was away. No, she definitely did. Jean, one of the library regulars, was talking to her about Downton Abbey, and Martha, who had been thinking of Alan, was suddenly aware that she’d been asked a question and couldn’t remember what it was.

“Sorry, Jean, what?” Martha was behind the desk, slowly working her way through a pile of returned books, and Jean’s head bobbed on the other side of the desktop computer.

“Do you think that someone will write a Downton Abbey novel?”

Jean had asked Martha that before. “If there’s money in it, then I suspect someone will do it.”

“You should do it, Martha.” Jean was apparently under the impression that because Martha read so much, she would also be able to write a publishable book.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” she said to Jean. “Make a fortune. Leave this library for good.”

“Oh, Martha.” Jean smiled. She wore no makeup except for lipstick and some of it was on her right canine. Martha decided not to tell her.

Alan was coming home from Denver that night, a...