On the day that Harvey Owlman’s son was accepted to Princeton, Harvey’s wife of 17 years left him. Harvey would not have said it was a bad marriage, though maybe never a passionate one. A shy underclassman, he’d barely known Pamela in high school, and it was she who asked him to the prom, and it was she who initiated their first-date sex in the wee hours of after prom morning, and it was she who proposed to him some minutes after that first intercourse, letting him know that she was almost three months pregnant by someone she wouldn’t name.

“No hard feelings,” she said to Harvey on her way out to the cab. A few weeks later he learned via one of the couple’s former friends that she’d taken up with Freddie Bass. “Makes sense since they were such lovebirds in high school and all,” the former friend told him with a smirk. “You can’t keep a good horse down.”

Harvey had no idea what the horse comment meant. Who was the horse? Who was the rider? What should he do now?

He went on vacation to Florida. Perhaps a mistake as it was spring break week. The beaches were jammed with kids. Harvey felt wildly out of place. But he couldn’t very well keep to his hotel room. Shy again after all these years, he mostly kept to his hotel room.