I remember Rita’s earlier proclamation: Love is pain. The Myron situation has upended her so because when her heart that had been in a decades-long deep freeze finally began to thaw with Myron in her life, she had tasted hope and then lost it. It occurs to me now that when Rita first came to see me, she was desperate not just because she would be turning seventy in a year, as she reported then, but because Myron’s disappearance had made her wonder the same thing I was wondering when I first saw Wendell: Had the man who’d just left been the “end of the line,” as I’d put it—the last chance at
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