I began this in January of 1998 because a therapist suggested it, and kept it because it turned out to be the only room in the house where anyone asked me a question. Everything I own is on paper. This is the other paper.

My first Sunday in the cottage.

Hugh is in Brookline, at the Ryder Cup, with clients. The firm took a tent a year ago and he'd promised, and when I asked on Wednesday whether he was still going, he looked at me with honest bewilderment and said, "Well, what else would I do?" It's the truest thing either of us has said all week.

He called at seven. His voice was hoarse from shouting. The Americans had been losing badly on Saturday night and came back today and won, and for three whole minutes he forgot everything and told me about it the way he used to tell me about a good trade when we were first married: the crowds, the last afternoon, some enormous putt, grown men running across a green in their good shoes. I listened. I was glad for him. I was. Then he stopped in the middle of a sentence, and I could hear him remember, and he said, "Well. I thought you'd want to know."

"I did," I said. "Thank you for calling." We were both so polite. We have always been so very polite.

I ate soup out of the pot, standing at the sink, looking at the river. Things I don't know: what I'll say to the children in October. What I'll do with my days. Whether the furnace works. Whether I'm brave or merely selfish, which Mother says are the same thing in a better coat.

Things I know: it's 10:40 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time. For the first time in fifteen years I know exactly what time it is, and that the time is mine.

The equinox. Day and night exactly the same length, the radio said this morning. It seemed a fair day to move.

What I took: my books from the library, still in their 1984 order. The four boxes from the attic. Clothes for one season. My grandmother's reading chair. Two pots, one pan, four white plates I bought on Tuesday for twelve dollars in honor of Phoebe. A lamp. The Sinatra record. Nothing that was a wedding present. Nothing with a monogram.

Hugh came home from the office at noon, which he has never done on a Thursday in his life, and carried my grandmother's chair out to the station wagon without being asked, and fitted it in on the diagonal, the way he fits everything, perfectly. Then he stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets and said, "You'll call if the car gives you trouble." It was kind. It was unbearable. I drove away at eleven miles an hour with him getting smaller in the mirror.

The cottage is four rooms in Rowayton, a few towns up the shore. It was built for an oysterman a hundred years ago and the floors slope toward the water, as if the house is still trying to get back to work. The kitchen is the size of my old pantry. The sink is under a window and the window looks straight out at the river and the boats. I washed my four plates in it tonight and I did, God help me, hum.

No curtains yet. The whole harbor can see me. Let it.

I called Mother this morning. I thought she should hear it from me and not from a woman at her bridge table whose daughter plays tennis in Greenwich, which is how Mother hears most things.

Silence first. Then: "Is there someone?" No, Mother. "Has he done something?" No, Mother. "Then I don't understand what you're talking about, Caroline."

I tried. I told her about the house and the committees and the days, and about Florence, and she let me get about halfway and then she said the thing I'll remember when I've forgotten everything else she ever told me: "Your father and I weren't happy either. Nobody was happy. We were married."

I didn't say anything for a moment. I was thinking of the Sunday nights, the record, the two of us on his shoes. I think he was happy then. I think she's never forgiven him for it.

She said I would become one of those women you see in the public library at eleven o'clock on a weekday morning. I said, "Mother, I've been one of those women for fifteen years. I'll simply be one with a library card." She hung up. She'll call again. She always calls again, if only to finish the argument.

Phoebe telephoned an hour later. "She called me too. She thinks I put you up to it. I've never been so flattered in my life."

The weekend, in stages, the way Hugh does everything.

Saturday morning he came down at seven with a yellow legal pad. He'd made a list, in his neat trader's capitals: things he could change. He'd cut back to four days. He'd come to Dr. R. with me. We'd go to Italy together in the spring. He'd sell the house if it was the house. He read it to me at the kitchen table, item by item, and it was the most loving document I've ever been handed, and I had to tell him, as carefully as I've ever said anything, that it wasn't a list of things. That he could do every item on it and I would still be standing in a room I don't live in.

He didn't argue. He folded the page in half and then in quarters.

Saturday afternoon he played eighteen holes, alone, which I have never known him to do.

Saturday night, at the kitchen counter, with a glass of water, he cried. I have known Hugh Thorne for seventeen years and I have never seen it, not at his father's funeral, not when the children were born. It lasted perhaps a minute. It was the closest I came to staying. Not because I'd changed my mind, but because I'd never seen him so plainly, and I thought, there he is, and then, where has he been, and then I didn't know which of us I meant.

This morning, what we agreed, like two people who've been negotiating in good faith: nothing hasty; no lawyers yet; we'll tell the children together, at the school's parents' weekend in October, because he asked for that and I gave it to him. I'm moving on Thursday. I didn't unpack my suitcase.

A word, since several of you wrote this week asking whether he reads this. I asked him yesterday whether he'd like me to take it down. He said he had never read it and didn't intend to start. It is the most Hugh sentence ever spoken, and I mean that almost entirely as a compliment.

I told him.

After dinner, which I cooked, which I never do on a weeknight, so perhaps he knew something before I spoke. Lamb chops. We ate in the kitchen. He talked about a man at the office who'd been let go and I listened, and then I asked him to come into the library, and he followed me with his coffee cup, and sat in the leather chair, and I stayed standing because I didn't trust my knees.

He thought someone had died. I watched him think it: his mother, one of the children. So I said it quickly, to spare him that. "Nobody's hurt. Hugh, I'm leaving."

He said, "Leaving for where?"

And then, when I'd explained that I meant leaving him, that I'd signed a lease on a cottage in Rowayton on Monday, he said "You've signed a lease," in exactly the tone he'd use for a junior trader who'd bought ten million of something without asking. It was almost funny. Neither of us laughed.

He asked if there was someone. I said no. "There's no one. That's rather the point." He asked if it was money, and I said no. If it was the house. No. If it was the therapist, "that woman in Stamford." I said, "It's me, Hugh. I'm what's happening."

He said, "We have a good life."

I said, "We have a very good life on paper."

He looked at me for a long moment and said, perfectly sincerely, not unkindly, "What else is there?"

And there it was. The whole fifteen years in three words, and he didn't even know he'd said them. I didn't answer. I couldn't have in any way he'd understand, and I didn't want to try to win.

He isn't a cruel man. I want that down here, in case anyone reading thinks this is that story. He's never raised his voice to me. He's faithful; I'd stake my life on it. He's a good father in the way his father was a good father, which is to say from a slight distance, with excellent tuition. He simply looked tonight like a man who's been told that the market he's traded in for twenty years has closed, permanently, and nobody sent a memo.

He went and poured himself a Scotch and didn't drink it. He asked about the children. I said we'd tell them together, when he was ready. I'm writing this in the guest room. I can hear him downstairs, walking from room to room. I think he's looking at the house. I think it's possible he's seeing it for the first time.

Signed the lease at ten this morning, at a card table in the back of a real estate office, with a ballpoint pen from the lumberyard. One year. The landlord is a widower of seventy-eight who repaired sails for fifty years and who asked me only two questions: did I smoke, and was I going to paint the kitchen yellow, because his wife had and he'd rather I didn't. I promised.

The first month's rent came out of the account my grandmother left me. It's been sitting in a bank in Philadelphia for the whole of my marriage like a coat forgotten in a cloakroom. I have never written a check from it before. My hand was steady. I was very proud of my hand.

Afterward I walked down to the little bridge and bought a coffee at the market and stood by the water drinking it, and nobody there knew me. Nobody said "Caroline!" across the parking lot and asked about the gala.

I'm going to tell him on Friday. Friday, because he doesn't go in on Saturday, so he'll have two days before he has to be anyone at the office.

Both children back at school. Oliver on Saturday, Eliza yesterday. This year Hugh came along for both, which he hasn't done since Oliver's first fall. He carried Eliza's trunk up three flights by himself and was charming to her roommate's parents and slipped Eliza a twenty when he thought I wasn't looking. Everything he did was right. That's the trouble with Hugh; you can never say he didn't do it right.

On the drive home I almost told him. We were on the Merritt Parkway, going under one of those old stone bridges, and I had the first word in my mouth. I didn't say it. Not in a car. You can't leave a man on the Merritt Parkway; there's nowhere for either of you to go.

Back from Maine. Thursday I told Dr. R. "I've decided." She didn't say anything for so long that I heard the clock in the next room. Then she asked how I felt. I said, "Terrified." Then I said, "Awake," which surprised us both.

Phoebe took the train up on Saturday and we looked at cottages. We said we were looking for "a friend." The agent, who was nobody's fool, called me "your friend" to my face all afternoon with a perfectly straight expression.

The third one was it. I knew at the door. Phoebe went straight to the kitchen, looked out the window over the sink, and turned around with her eyebrows up. "Well," she said. "Water. That's an improvement on my brick wall."

This morning Hugh was on the telephone to London by five; I could hear the murmur through the floor. Oliver took the Beetle cat out with a friend. Eliza was reading on the porch with her feet on the rail. I took the old rowboat out alone, around the point, farther than I usually go, and shipped the oars and sat in the middle of the bay while the fog burned off.

Nothing happened. No gulls wheeled meaningfully. I simply sat there, and at some point I noticed I had decided, the way you notice you've stopped being cold. There wasn't a moment. There was a before and there was an after, and I was in the after, and I rowed back.

I'm writing it here first. Before Dr. R., before Phoebe. This page has been the only place I've ever said anything first.

I've decided.

All weekend the radio on the dock has been about the Kennedy boy's plane, lost off the Vineyard on Friday night with his wife and her sister. Everyone in the harbor has gone quiet about it in the way people do up here, standing on the float with their hands in their pockets, looking out to sea as if they might be able to help from two hundred miles away.

Hugh listened to the news at supper and said, "Terrible," and then, after a while, "It's a reminder to be grateful." He reached over and squeezed my hand, which he doesn't often do at the table. I squeezed back. And sat there wondering, God forgive me, grateful for what, exactly. For being here. For having time. For the time I have. What I'm doing with it.

The Fourth at the club. Fireworks over the harbor. Hugh in his blue blazer talking to the men, Oliver somewhere with a pack of boys, and Eliza, twelve, sitting beside me on the seawall in the dark with her chopped-off hair, eating a hot dog with great concentration.

Between the red ones and the gold ones she said, without looking at me, "Mom, are you happy?"

And I said, "What a question."

It came out of my mouth in my mother's exact voice, and I heard it, and Eliza heard it, and she shrugged and went back to her hot dog, and I've been lying awake with it for two nights. That's the answer I got at twelve. It's the answer I swore I'd never give. It turns out it's in the blood, like the stuffing and the silence, and it will be in hers too unless somebody in this family finally answers a straight question straight.

The house works in summer. That's what I noticed today. With the children home it's full: wet towels on the stairs, Oliver's music under his door, Eliza's friends in the kitchen at midnight eating cereal. The rooms are used. Even the living room, where nobody lives, had a sleeping bag in it this morning.

Phoebe's question is still on the terrace where she left it. I walk around it on the way to the car.

Here's what I can't settle: am I allowed to leave a house that works for them for three months a year? Or is that exactly the sort of reasoning that keeps women in window seats until they're seventy? Dr. R. is on vacation until the twelfth. I'm going to have to answer my own questions for eleven days, which is the longest I've been asked to do it since 1984.