JILL WASN’T making much headway with The Scarlet Letter. It was partly Tom’s fault, she thought; back when he was in high school, he’d complained so bitterly about the book that it must have poisoned her mind. Actually, he hadn’t just complained; she’d come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the
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