Love Among the Ultramoderns

Some towns remember every visitor.

Rodgers is a member of the Errands of Eros, a secret fraternity whose agents travel to small towns to find neglected wives and offer what their marriages won't. He has oaths. He has methods. He has the untroubled confidence of a man who has always been the one with the secret. His latest mission sends him to Poagstown, where a woman named Bessa is waiting and the locals are generous in ways that feel almost rehearsed. Rodgers has talked his way into and out of every situation the brotherhood has put him in. Nothing about this town should be different. But the welcome is too warm. The drinks hit too hard. And everyone seems to know his name before he offers it.