I’m not sure when I actually called the police. I think in a blind moment of rage I’d meant to report her as a thief but when they arrived, neat and stern in their blue uniforms, I found myself telling them that my wife had been taken from me in a crowd. I showed them the glove she’d left behind. I described her in the most clinical of terms; I told them the color of her hair (blonde) and her eyes (blue) and I never mentioned the way she burned from the inside.

Maybe it was easier that way. To tell them she’d been taken. Maybe I was embarrassed. Maybe some part of me still believed it, despite the missing valuables. Maybe in my heart I couldn’t face the fact that the beautiful, bored woman I loved had left me like a fool in the streets of Manhattan, had perhaps been planning to leave from the first moment I showed her our plane tickets to New York.