So Paula assumed Don was eligible when she sent the first email. She had no marital aspirations herself (having not succeeded in the institution, more than once). She knew he was poor (she lost the money she invested through him, and she wasn’t alone, and he soon left that business for the separate but equally dismal field of residential real estate). Paula assumed it was okay to flirt with a free heart.

Both of them aspired to write. Neither expected to make a living at it, but that didn’t stop them from keeping journals, trying poetry, occasionally attempting a short story. This meant the emails were readable at least, and sometimes memorable. In fact, it only took half a week after Paula sent her first “I’m here – be gentle with me” and Don responded with defloration double entendres before they found themselves exchanging chapters of autobiography.

Each managed to write with an attractive voice. Don was funny, affectionate, and on the verge of macho. Paula expressed herself with humor and insight, and when she complained she tried not to come off as shrill. For she did complain a little, when he called her “Fluffy,” or assumed she was heavier or more Jewish than she was.

Don didn’t complain. Sometimes he engaged in screen silence for a day or two, which tended to prompt Paula to send short “are you all right?” messages, to which he then responded with masculine monosyllables. Those exchanges made her look anxious and talkative and him appear busy and taciturn. The screenplay was then favorable to Don. Paula resented it. They quibbled and then engaged in makeup emails.

But they continued. They wrote their stories to each other from birth through a few post-college years before interruptions occurred. They engaged in suggestive comments. They signed their electronic missives with increasingly long strings of X’s.

They learned that their early childhoods were spent two towns away from one another, in Suffolk County, in New York state. They found coincidence in the fact that their birthdays were exactly six months apart; both commented that their astrologer friends said the best mates split the calendar like that. They interrupted narrations about their first sexual experiences, not because the words got too hot, but because those memories reminded them of more they wanted to tell one another. Right about then, Paula sent Don an explicit short story she’d drafted (titled “Sex”), and Don confessed how passionately he wanted to nibble on the underside of Paula’s breasts: not enough to cause pain, exactly, but sufficient to mark her so she’d remember him all day. That email made her remember him much longer than a day.

Two events then occurred in notable succession. Paula bought plane tickets, and Don shared a sexual anecdote from his hippie history.

They were American Airlines tickets – SFO to DFW to San Antonio, for late March, for a long weekend. It made sense to Paula: a scenic city close to Austin but not Austin, to get Don away from work and stress. It made sense to Don for other reasons (“I’ll have to take a bit of care arranging,” he mentioned cryptically, and Paula didn’t ask him for details).

She bought the tickets for $215, two months before the trip. She looked forward to looking forward. So his early February recollection upset her.

He wrote about an experience from 1966. Paula was 15 then, but Don was a fully formed individual of 24 years. He was living somewhat communally that summer, with one ex-roommate from college and two other guys. It was the typical situation for white guys of that era: junk food and litter, water pipes and beer, nubile women in bright colors. Don’s ex-roommate had a wild little sister named Maggie who visited their bachelor den every chance she got. She was 13 and adept at sneaking out of her parents’ house; it became something of a ritual to return her to the suburbs on Monday mornings.

Don sent an email to Paula, fondly describing the first time Maggie climbed into bed with him. He characterized their romps as pure fun, unmitigated play, lots of laughter along with easy orgasms.

Paula objected. She typed the words “child abuse” into her next email. Don reacted with weird indignation. He even brought Maggie into the conversation; he was still in touch with her brother, and he acquired an email from Maggie where she agreed that their “affair” had been harmless, actually good for her, a transition from childhood to adolescence that she’ll ever appreciate.