This afternoon I went into one of those surf shops, and I don’t know what came over me, but I somehow walked out carrying a wet suit and a boogie board.

I guess I’m going to have to learn how to ride it now. Or surf it. Or whatever the right terminology is. I’m quite chuffed about it.

Ellen woke on Monday morning feeling drained and wrung out, and was horrified when she opened her appointment book to find her day filled with back-to-back appointments without even five minutes for a lunch break.

She could vaguely remember thinking blithely to herself, “Oh, I’ll manage!” when she’d scheduled so many appointments. Now she thought longingly of her bed and how truly, amazingly glorious it would be to slide back under the blankets and sleep the day away. If only she felt properly, contagiously ill, with actual symptoms, then she could get on the phone and cancel all her appointments. But she knew she was just worn out. There had been too much eating and drinking and nervous socializing on the weekend. Too much heightened emotion. Too little sleep and too much sex. She suspected she was coming down with a bad case of cystitis.

She was also out of milk, which for a few moments as she stood at the open fridge seemed like the end of the world. She actually stamped her foot. She needed the crunch of cereal contrasting with the coolness of milk.

She put stale bread in the toaster with fast, sulky movements, as if the person responsible for the lack of milk was watching and feeling guilty. She went and picked up the newspaper from the front yard, where the delivery person had considerately thrown it straight in the middle of her front hedge so that she had to rustle through unpleasantly damp, dewy leaves to retrieve it.

Then, to top it all off, as she was eating her toast (which tasted weirdly acidic) and reading the paper (which was full of bad news: murders, fatalities, wars and suicide bombs—the world was adrift on a sea of tears) she came upon an article under the heading “A-List Turns Out for Society Wedding.”

And there was a picture of her client Rosie. It had been about two months since Ellen had last seen her, and during that time she’d lost a lot of weight. All her curves were gone. Her shoulders were bony and hunched in a strapless wedding dress, and she was surrounded by four tall, skinny bridesmaids in floor-length gowns. So she’d gone ahead with the wedding. Her revelation under Ellen’s supposedly skillful hypnosis that the reason she wasn’t having any luck giving up smoking was because she didn’t really like her fiancé had meant nothing at all. Either she’d decided that she didn’t really feel that way, or she was marrying him anyway, maybe for the money or the prestige or because she didn’t have the courage to cancel the wedding after all the invitations had gone out to the “A-list.”

Either way, it left Ellen feeling even more depressed. It made her feel pointless and incompetent.

The phone rang and Ellen quickly answered it, hoping for a cancellation, ideally of the morning’s first appointment so she could go back to bed.

“Good morning,” she said briskly. “This is Ellen.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re having a very good morning at all!”

It was Harriet, her ex-boyfriend’s younger sister. They had stayed friends after Ellen and Jon broke up.

Harriet was a tiny, brittle, bossy woman, and very occasionally her somewhat malicious conversation was exactly what Ellen felt like, in the same way that she sometimes found herself oddly craving the bitter taste of black licorice.

But right now, the sound of Harriet’s slightly nasal voice shredded Ellen’s nerves like a cheese grater.

She took a deep bracing breath as though she was about to run up a steep hill and said, “How are you, Harriet?”

“Fine, fine, just thought I’d call for a chat. It’s been months.”

Only Harriet would think that seven-thirty on a Monday morning was a good time for a chat.

“Yes, yes, too long,” said Ellen, and let her eyes briefly close. She felt an absurd desire to scream.

Whenever she spoke to Harriet, Jon suddenly jumped to the front of her consciousness. She could hear his voice in the similar speech patterns of Harriet’s voice. She could see his heavy-lidded half smile, half sneer. Harriet reminded her that Jon still existed.

She preferred to be bright and bubbly and moving full steam ahead with her life when she talked to Harriet so that the appropriate messages would get back to Jon. (She knew that Harriet would make sure she mentioned every conversation to Jon. That’s what she did: collected information and then shared it around, little pellets of power.) Ideally, Ellen should mention Patrick right now (Have you heard? Ellen has a new boyfriend), but she didn’t have the energy to give him the enthusiasm he deserved.

“How’s Jon?” she said instead. Let’s bring him out on center stage, instead of letting him lurk about in the corners of this conversation.

“Funny you should mention him. You’re not going to believe this, but my eternal bachelor of a brother is getting married. We’re all in a state of shock. Can you believe it?”

“No,” said Ellen. She cleared her throat. “Goodness.”

She had lived with Jon for four years and the word “marriage” had never been mentioned. It had been her understanding that he didn’t believe in the institution, and it never seemed to occur to him to ask how Ellen felt about it. In fact, he just didn’t believe in marriage to her.

Her feelings were quite badly hurt. She actually felt them break, like a row of fragile porcelain cups that had exploded all at once. There were shards of pain flooding her body; tiny ones prickling her sinuses, a huge sharp one lodged in her chest. Oh, for heaven’s sake, you don’t care! You’re in love with another man! You’re properly in love for the first time! You don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care. Except she did.