It was a quixotic escapade from inception, but it was also irresistible. The surreality around Julie triggered a kind of charisma in her that shanghaied Mark, and then partnership dynamics went to work.

Every aspect must have been favorable, for Mark was nothing if not sober, cautious, and deliberate. He lacked impulsiveness, like a tired old pet. He was 58, small-framed, fit for walking, a quiet widower with a tendency to kidney stones and gastric reflux. He drank cranberry juice daily. He never ate after dinner. Many who met him assumed he was gay, and he may have collected his half-dozen female friends as much for the heterosexual aura as for the companionship. Or so thought Julie, who was #1 or #2 of those girl friends.

Julie was 54 but about 15 years younger than Mark in attitude. He lived with two purebred cats while she shared her home with a retriever mutt. He used his television to play rental DVDs of foreign films; she paid monthly for extreme cable and was unembarrassed about the six to eight hours she ran the TV nightly. They both had degrees in English, but his was a serious doctorate after a serious B.A. and before law school, while hers was only a bachelor’s, and even that was selected so she could continue to read and write instead of for any practical application.

They were connected through Liz. She had been Mark’s law partner. She was Julie’s friend. She introduced them because she thought they would like one another and she hoped they’d fall in love. Liz was a dedicated attorney and a cautious individual but she was an incurable romantic. The proof of her ailment was in their errand, for Mark and Julie were on their way to rescue Liz from her impulsive fifth marriage.

Blame it on classmates.com. That’s what Liz did. Her old high school boyfriend never would have found her but for that website. It had been 46 years and she was on her fifth last name. But she consented to be found. She was 64 years old and she thought she ought to know better, but she realized recently that she consented to be seduced by Pete’s emails and phone calls, his nostalgia and his forceful talk, into leaving the nicest, most boring husband in the world, a practice she wanted to retire from anyway, her middle-aged son, and her three close friends.

Pete proved to be forceful and not much else. At first Liz described his controlling behavior as “directness.” Or “linear:” she’d say that Pete had been career Navy and an engineer, so his thinking was very linear. He wanted Liz to visit him and she did. He wanted her to leave Jim and pretty soon she left Jim. He helped her decide to retire and then he wanted her to move to Seattle so badly that she did that too. His directness next led to her divorce and their marriage. She started shaving her pubic hair when he asked, and she took up golf.

Cracks appeared in their romantic union when Pete tried to keep Liz in their bed even though his snoring was destroying her sleep. The morning after that argument she called Julie to ventilate; until that conversation Liz’s friends thought she was deliriously happy.

It was then, just four weeks past, that Julie first heard about Pete’s fierce determination to spend every moment with Liz. He was 68, he kept declaring, and he’d finally hooked up with the woman he should have married in the first place, and he wanted to spend whatever days remained with Liz, always with Liz, doing whatever it was he wanted. Pete’s first passion was to share every moment with Liz. His second passion was to never leave his aging German Shepherd. Back when he adopted Bennett ten years ago, Pete promised that after he retired he’d never leave again, and he was keeping his word. Liz wasn’t supposed to leave Pete to visit her son or friends, and Pete wouldn’t leave Bennett.

Meanwhile, to make Liz feel more at home Pete brought her a dog. Samantha was a rescued Greyhound, and before Liz could get her wits about her she’d fallen in love with the fawn-like creature. So Liz couldn’t fly either, because she wasn’t putting her skittish pet in a baggage compartment.