ONLINE, I FIND all sorts of Thane Bernards who are not the right one. There’s the man who runs a crab-fishing boat in Alaska. The public works director in Johannesburg. The hedge fund employee who is selling his house on the Margaret River in Australia. There are three Thane Bernards who have gotten married in the past year who are too young to be Win’s Thane, and four that have died, but who are too old to be him.

I find one promising lead—a man of the right age who teaches figure drawing at a university in Belgium, and I pull a photo of him up on my phone. Win, in bed, actually sits up a little as I am doing this. She straightens her robe and dabs a little bit of Blistex on her chapped lips before she takes the screen from me, as if he might be able to see her.

It breaks my heart.

“Wait,” she says. “What do you know about him?”

I know that he has been employed for ten years at this university. I know that he belongs to a rowing club and has competed as part of a master’s division four with coxswain. I know that he wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper about a town ordinance that would affect bike lanes.

I also know this isn’t what Win wants to know.

“He’s still married,” I say softly.

Her hand tightens on the edge of the quilt, and then relaxes. She reaches for the phone. I watch her peer at the photo, touching the screen to enlarge the details of his face.

Win closes her eyes. “It’s not him.” Her voice is raw, her relief palpable. “It’s not him.”

* * *

—

AFTER DINNER THAT night, I tell Brian I have some paperwork to finish and I go into my office. On my laptop, I receive a notification from another search engine. This one has found the name Thane Bernard in, of all places, a 2009 Rolling Stone magazine. David Bowie had done an interview from his London home, discussing his collection of art by old masters like Rubens, Balthus, and Tintoretto as well as more modern art by Henry Moore and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also mentioned a recent acquisition by artist Nathaniel Bernard. The painting, sold for $10,500, was called Prometheus, and styled like the famous Rubens, but instead of chains wrapped around the subject’s wrists there were ethernet cables and telephone cords and power lines. The mythical eagle was not picking out the victim’s liver, but instead a beakful of British pound notes. Part of the joy of art, Bowie said, was finding artists no one else had discovered yet—like Thane.

The reason I haven’t been able to find Professor Thane Bernard is because he isn’t teaching art. He is creating it, and signing the pieces with his full first name.

I keep searching, using this new information, and find sales from auctions in France, Belgium, Italy. An announcement of a show at a Gagosian gallery. An appearance at Art Basel. Although there is an e-trail of his career, there is almost no personal information about him. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. I can’t find a photograph.

But then, in Google Images: a picture from a charity auction in London to raise money for a homeless shelter. There are five men in black tie. From l. to r.: A. Rothschild, T. Haven-Shields, H. Ludstone, R. Champney, N. Bernard.

N. Bernard.

When I blow up the image, it’s grainy. His head is bald. His eyes are dark as night, the pupils and the irises almost indistinguishable.

I print a copy of this photograph so that I can bring it to Win tomorrow.

Then I reply to the original email from the site that found the original reference. For another fifty dollars, do I want them to find a last known address?

Yes. Yes, I do.

I click out of my mail app. I’ve done what Win asked; I should close my laptop and go to my husband, who is in bed, watching Stephen Colbert. But instead I find myself opening Facebook. My fingers find the search bar of their own accord, and type in Wyatt’s name.

I’m not sure if I’m relieved or upset when there are no results.

That should be it. I should feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. But then I think of Win’s voice: Picture the person you thought you’d wind up with.

It isn’t cheating, if I loved him first. It isn’t cheating, if I never act on the information. It isn’t cheating, if Brian was the first to look away.

There are so many ways to lie to myself.

If my relationship with Brian has any chance of stabilizing, and we can’t go backward, maybe I need to even the distance between us. As Brian said: nothing happened. But for a heartbeat, he wondered what it might be like to be with someone else. And so will I.

Unlike Thane Bernard, Wyatt Armstrong has a robust Internet presence. He finished his dissertation in 2005 and published a book that analyzed the text and grammar of the Book of Two Ways. He became the head of Yale’s Egyptology program after the death of Professor Dumphries—I skim the eulogy he wrote in our alumni magazine. I read about his search for the missing tomb of Djehutynakht, and his discovery of it five years ago. To date, he hasn’t published his findings.

Then I click on the link for images.

It feels like a punch to the gut. Wyatt is still lean and long, folded like a jackknife as he looks over his shoulder in the cramped chute of a tomb toward a camera. His face is familiar and unfamiliar at once. His searing blue eyes—the ones that look into you rather than at you—are tempered by a wariness, and there are lines at the corners now. I am reminded of everything that has come between us: people, distance, time.

As if this was done to us.

As if I didn’t do it to myself.

“Oh.” I hear a soft voice behind me, and I turn to see the wound of Brian’s face.

For a sinking, terrible moment, I wait for the ground to swallow me whole, and when it doesn’t I follow Brian back into our bedroom and close the door. My mind is spinning so fast for an explanation that the words are already tumbling out of my mouth. “I was looking up Win’s old boyfriend—”

“And you found yours instead?” Brian interrupts.

The pain in his expression is so acute that I stumble. “You…you know who Wyatt is?”

“I’m not stupid.”

I sink onto the bed. “I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us,” Brian murmurs.

He sits down beside me. I glance at his dark hair, the raw knuckles of his hands, the slope of his shoulders, and wonder when I last really, truly, looked at Brian; when I saw him, instead of just seeing who I needed him to be.

“Are you going to leave me?” Brian asks.

“No,” I say immediately, but it’s just a reflex, like when the doctor taps your knee with a hammer and you can’t do anything but watch it jump.

“Why were you looking him up, then?”

“Because finding Win’s ex made me wonder what Wyatt is doing now.” I try Win’s question on him. “Isn’t there someone in your life you thought you’d wind up with?”

“No,” he says. “But by some miracle, I did anyway.”

“I am a thousand percent sure Wyatt doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

“Why would you say that? He could be in a pyramid or God knows what looking you up, too.”

“I didn’t realize you even knew his name.”

He hesitates. “He sent you letters that I found in your mother’s bin of junk mail. I should have given them to you. But by then, I loved you. And you seemed to love me.” He looks up. “I’m a physicist, Dawn. I know what makes things move. You came here for your mother—but no one rockets that hard and that fast unless there’s a force driving them away.”

I would do anything to erase the anguish threaded through his voice. “I wanted you. I chose you.”

“Back then,” he says. “And now?”

I bite back my response: You decided you didn’t want me first. But this is not a game of one-upsmanship. This is not an eye for an eye. This is two people, peeling back veneer, to discover that the wall they expected to find underneath is disintegrating.

“Don’t you think we have a happy marriage?”

He considers this. “Can you have a happy marriage if your spouse doesn’t think so?”

I wonder if he is talking about me, or himself. “I obviously had a life before I met you,” I tell Brian. “I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

“I never asked you to. But my wife told me recently that not talking about something can be just as bad as flaunting it.”

My cheeks burn. “After fifteen years, do you really think I don’t love you?”

Brian is silent for a long moment. I can see pieces moving in his mind. “After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

* * *

—

AFTER A SLEEPLESS night, I take the coward’s way out, and drive to Win’s before Brian even wakes. When Felix opens the front door, he looks just as exhausted as I am.

“Rough night?” I ask.

“She couldn’t get comfortable. No matter what I tried.”

“Let me see what I can do,” I offer.

Win is tossing and turning on the rented hospital bed when I enter, her legs kicking at the light cotton blanket. Her eyes open when she hears me.

“I’m still here,” she says.

“I noticed.”

“Dawn.” Her voice is small, boxed, neatly folded. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

In the weeks I’ve been with Win, she has been plucky, angry, and pragmatic, by turns. But I’ve never seen her defeated, until now. “What’s hard?”