His last words to her, as she got out of his car: “I’m sorry. Goodnight.” She waited twenty minutes for the train to arrive and she felt like a whore.
For his part, William felt nothing. What happened to him…no, what he did seemed inevitable, a train set in motion on the day his wife left him in his house and accelerated on the day his daughter disavowed him in that park in New York. He sat on the sofa where he sat when his wife spit her ultimatum at him in July, the day before she left him. Today was another Sunday, now in September. And he was alone with his single-malt, neat, and his thoughts. He had done it. It had been so easy, and he had done it. Less than a month after congratulating himself in early September about having overcome the temptation to simply accept his daughter, and his sister, he had done something worse than they had done. The sacred vow he made before his God, of fidelity, was smashed, and he feared his faith was in tatters.