Die For You

14

“You mean there aren’t ever any new days?” Trevor asked. He was young, really young. Anyway, too young for an existential crisis. “Just the same days repeating over and over again forever?”

There was something like horror on his face, as if he couldn’t believe life could be that mundane, with so few surprises. I’d been charged with watching him for the afternoon while Linda took a meeting with her agent and Erik was with Em on some father-daughter trip. Trevor and I had planned for a walk to the chess shop off Washington Square Park, then some kind of high-caloric snack his parents would never allow between lunch and dinner. Maybe he was five or thereabouts.

At the chess shop, we’d lingered for nearly an hour, inspecting chess pieces of all shapes and sizes and incarnations-dragons and wizards, Alice in Wonderland characters, medieval courts, Smurfs. There were elaborate boards of marble and glass, soapstone and metal, plastic. In the end, he chose a simple wooden set with hand-carved pieces. Our Trev, the purist. He had his prize in a bag and we were sitting on a bench in the park, near the speed-chess players, with the leaves changing colors and NYU students moving about with dense backpacks, some kids doing skateboard jumps, and a homeless man aggressively jangling a cup of change.

“But how do you know? You don’t know what will happen in forever,” he said, always practical. “No one does.”

I shrugged, feeling the full weight of my failure to explain this matter. “It’s just the way it is, kiddo.”

It made a kind of hopeful sense that we might wake up one day and it wouldn’t be Tuesday or Saturday, but Purpleday or Marshmallowday. And on this day, things would be different; maybe gravity would be just slightly altered so everything would seem lighter, or the sun would have a slightly pinkish tint to it and everyone would look a little prettier.

“These markers of the passage of time are constructed by the human mind,” I told Trevor. He couldn’t have really understood me. But he seemed to, gazing at me thoughtfully. “The days are always the same because people made it that way. To keep order.”

He seemed to ponder this for a second, picking at a loose thread on his jeans.

“That’s stupid,” he said finally, bereft.

And I was suddenly mad at myself that I hadn’t allowed him the hope that one day in his life wouldn’t be exactly the day he expected it to be. I could have conceded that he was right, that, in fact, I did not know what would happen in forever. I backpedaled.

“Every day is different, Trevor, you know. Surprises and magic can happen anytime.”

He nodded quickly, as though at the advanced age of five he already knew this.

“But it will always happen on a Wednesday,” he said heavily. “Or a Monday.”

I’d always thought of Emily as the poet, but maybe Trevor had a little bit of the tortured artist in him, always striving to make the world match his vision, always wishing for stardust where there was only ash.

“Come on, Trev, let’s go get a shake and fries,” I said.

He brightened then, as though the conversation that left me grieving had never occurred. That’s the gift of childhood, the ability to be distracted from the big things by the little things.

FUNNY, HOW YOU find yourself thinking of the most inane things in the worst moments in your life. I could have run after Marcus but I didn’t. Instead I stood rooted, for I don’t know how long, stunned by the woman on the floor, by my encounter with my husband. It was impossible to reconcile my life as it was in this minute with the life I’d had just a few days ago.

I knelt down beside the woman I recognized as Camilla Novak from the photo Detective Crowe had shown me and put my hand on her shoulder. I’d just talked to her; it seemed impossible that she’d be dead. In spite of all the blood, I wondered stupidly if she might be breathing, like Fred had been. At first glance, I’d thought he was gone, since he’d been so pale, had lost so much blood. But no, her body was already unnaturally rigid, still.

I touched her for another reason, something less noble than hoping to save her life. I just wanted to see what that white, white skin felt like. I didn’t feel any revulsion in that moment.

Her flesh was like clay earth. Under my hand, I could feel the warmth draining. What leaves us? When the heart stops pumping blood through our veins, when the lungs stop filling and releasing, a door opens and something exits, leaving behind the bare stage. The curtain is open but the lights come down. What is it? It’s more than the failure of the machine to operate, isn’t it?

“Most people would flee from a dead body, get as far away as possible,” Crowe would later say. “Only in the movies do civilians lean in close to see if someone lying in a pool of blood-with her throat cut, no less-might still be alive. People literally swoon, faint, vomit at the sight of so much gore.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I’m getting that.”

But that was much later.

“Oh my God.”

I turned, startled from my thoughts, to see Erik standing in the doorway. He looked stricken, as if he might pass out. He turned away, took a step back toward the hallway.

“Shut the door,” I said sharply. “Lock it.”

“We have to get out of here, Isabel,” he said, glancing behind him. “Right now we’re going to that lawyer. What are you doing?”

“Christ, Erik,” I hissed. “Get in here and shut the door.”

He hesitated, seemed reluctant to leave the safety of the doorway, and then obeyed.

“Who did this, Izzy? Did you-”

“Did I?” I stared at him, incredulous. He looked so horrified, so much like Trevor, his eyes wide, this earnest line to his mouth.

He lifted his palms. “Then who?”

I looked back at Camilla Novak-her long, thin limbs, the exposed lace of her bra. On the coffee table there was a half-full cup of tea, the press of her lipstick on the rim. Her jacket and purse lay on the sofa. She was on her way somewhere when Marcus came to her door. She’d let him in. He might have been able to trick her from the street door. But she would have kept her apartment door shut until she saw him. She knew him; she opened her door and let him in. Then he killed her.

“Marcus was here,” I said.

“You saw him? Here?”

I nodded, thinking of that look on Marc’s face. It wasn’t malice really, or anger. It was a look I recognized, a superior kind of patience. Who was he?

“He killed her?”

“She was the only connection to the real Marcus Raine,” I said, so calmly. No emotion. I didn’t even sound like myself. I got up and walked over to Camilla Novak’s bag on the couch.

“What are you doing?”

It was a cheap knockoff, flimsy, fraying at the seams. I started rifling through its contents. A hot-pink cell phone, a purple sequined wallet, two tubes of lip gloss, mascara, tweezers. Then something else that gave me a little jolt of surprise.

“You’re getting prints all over everything,” Erik said. He stuffed his own fingers under arms folded tightly across his chest. Television had turned us all into crime-scene experts.

“Do you know what she said to me about him, the night we told you we were engaged?”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Linda,” I said, annoyed that he wasn’t following my crazed train of thought. “What she said about Marcus?”

He shook his head, looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine what relevance this had, why I would be thinking about this now. His eyes fell on Camilla’s body and stayed there, as though once he’d allowed himself to look, he couldn’t look away.

“She said he was just like our father.”

He brought his gaze back to me quickly, looked surprised. We never, and I mean never, talked about my father, so raw and angry were the wounds his parting left in us.

“What do you think she meant by that?”

He rolled his eyes, started shifting from foot to foot-boyish, anxious. “Izzy Let’s go. We’ll talk about this in the cab.”

“I mean,” I said, all the unexpressed anger I’d had for her in that moment rising like a tide I couldn’t quell, “my father was a kind, loving man. He was warm, affectionate. He had a jovial way about him, a light.”

“I don’t know what she meant. I didn’t know your father.”

“She must have told you.”

“Isabel,” he said, walking over to me quickly, putting firm hands on my shoulders. “Listen. To. Me. We have to get out of here right now or call the police and tell them what’s happened. A woman is dead. Marcus was here. He’s a wanted man. He’s done terrible things. We’re letting him get away.”

“Oh, he’s not getting away. I promise you that. He does have a head start, true.”

“Iz.” He narrowed his eyes, gripped my shoulders a little harder. I could tell by the half-worried, half-angry look on his face that he thought I was in shock, losing it a little. He couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d never seen things more clearly. Or so it seemed at the time-with a head injury and a dead body at my feet, and my husband a murderous criminal on the run from the law.

“Just tell me what you think and then you can call the police.”

“Oh my God.” He bowed his head and released an exasperated breath. “Okay. She meant that the facade was different than the underpinnings. That Marcus presented one face, but that, like your father, there was a dark inner life. She felt his coldness. She said that your father was cold, too, in a way. Even though he seemed very sweet, very loving, that there was something about him that was afraid to truly connect, that was terrified of the intimacy of real love. He had a powerful need to isolate, that he was damaged in ways no one realized until his suicide.”

I found myself nodding slowly, a great sadness swelling inside me. She saw him, both of them, with her photographer’s eye. My writer’s brain saw other men, men I had created and explained.

I moved into Erik and let him hold me for a second.

“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said into his shoulder. Behind his back, I took Camilla’s little surprise from her cheap bag, which I still held in my hand. It felt cool and light, a game of play-pretend, a fantasy.

“This is not your fault,” he said. “Let’s call the lawyer and the police.”

“It is my fault. And really, I’m the only one who can fix this. Otherwise, it’s all gone-the money, my marriage, our family as it was. He steals everything and gets away with it.”

“Honey,” he said sadly, “it’s gone either way. We’ll start again.”

“No.”

I moved away from him and he saw the gun in my hand, sighed and rolled his eyes at the sight of it, as though it were a toy, as though I was throwing a childish tantrum.

“You tell them I pulled a gun on you,” I said, sounding a little shaky, a little nuts. “That you found me here and I wouldn’t go with you.”

He shook his head, gave me a disbelieving smile. “Oh, come on, Izzy”

“I love you. You’re a great husband and a great dad.”

He knew I’d never hurt him, and I knew he knew it. But we played out the scene; he saw something in my face and backed away from the door, put his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.

“I wasn’t enough to keep him with us. None of us were.”

He blinked, somehow knowing I wasn’t talking about Marc. “This is not about your father, Izzy. This is not the same.”

I put Camilla’s bag over my shoulder.

“What am I supposed to tell them, Iz? The police? Linda and the kids?”

“The truth. Just tell them the truth. I pulled a gun on you and now I’m going after my husband.”

“The police are starting to think you’re guilty, that you had something to do with all of this. How am I going to convince them otherwise if you run off like this?”

“They’re right. I’m guilty, like any wife who is guilty for ignoring all the signs, all her instincts.”

“You’re not yourself, girl. Don’t do this.”

But I left him there and he didn’t come after me. And I left the building and ran up the street, then ducked into the subway. I wasn’t flying blind. I knew where to go, maybe where I should have been all along.

15

She never thought of that night anymore. It lived inside her like a room she never entered in a big, drafty old house. She might walk down the dark hallway might even rest her hand on the knob, but she never opened the door. She heeded Blue Beard’s warning, thought Pandora was a fool. There are some memories better abandoned. Common wisdom demanded examination of the past, probing of childhood pain and trauma. Then-acceptance, release, and ultimately forgiveness. But Linda wondered if this was always the best course. Maybe this was a philosophy that just had people picking at scabs, creating scars on flesh that might have healed better if left alone.

She didn’t want to go back there to that night when she awoke with a start, and the room she shared with Isabel was washed in a moonlight so bright that for a moment she thought it was morning. But then through her window she saw the pale blue face of the moon low and bloated in the sky. She slipped from bed, not worried about waking Izzy who slept soundly like Margie, had to be vigorously roused in the morning. She was a buried ball under the covers, her breathing so deep, so steady, it almost seemed fake. Linda moved over to the window and looked out onto the backyard. The rusting old swing set they hadn’t touched in ages sagged dangerously, its frame crooked in the moonlight. The grand old oak towered, its leaves whispering just a bit in the very slight breeze. Off near the edge of the property, just before a stand of trees, her father’s work shed stood wide and solid, looking righteous, though it was as rickety as the swing set.

A good wind, her mother said, and that thing will be in splinters.

You wish, her father countered.

She saw that one of the doors was ajar. Eagerly, she pulled on jeans under her nightgown, slipped her feet into a pair of Keds, walked quickly down the hall.

The day belonged to Isabel. But at night, when Margie and Izzy were off in their deep, dreamless sleep, Linda was Daddy’s girl. Linda shared a minor case of insomnia with her father, where sometimes the night called them both, didn’t offer any sleep at all.

“We’re the moonwalkers, my girl. Just you and me, alone with the stars.”

She crossed the yard, the dewy grass soaking through the canvas of her sneakers. She heard a rustling and banging behind her, on the side of the house. Raccoons in the garbage. Margie was going to have a fit. Linda would tell her father and they’d have a laugh. It was another thing they shared, a mischievous pleasure in the things that got her mother’s “panties in a knot.” She couldn’t have said why at the time. But when the cool and measured Margie cursed and blustered over scattered garbage, or the same fuse that always blew, or the cabinet door that kept coming off its hinge, Linda and her father exchanged a secret smile.

“Was that the only way you could connect with your father, over a shared disdain for your mother?” Erik had asked her once. Linda felt ashamed, chastised.

“Disdain isn’t the right word.” She sounded like Isabel.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. It was almost a relief when she lost her cool. Like, wow, she’s human after all-not some robot, always programmed for appropriateness. I think we liked it because-sometimes we wanted to see those frayed edges that everybody else has.”

“Hmm,” said Erik. “I don’t see her that way, not stiff and robotic like that. I find her kind of warm, funny.” “That’s because she’s not your mother.”

“Touché.”

AT THE DOOR, she’d knocked lightly. “Dad? Daddy?”

She thought she might find him dozing, sitting upright on his work stool, with his elbow on the table, chin resting on fist, eyes closed. Or he might be so focused on his work that he wouldn’t hear her come in. But then he’d look at her and smile.

“Hello, Moonbeam,” he’d say. “Have a seat.”

And she’d have him to herself. The day belonged to Izzy His eyes always drifted to Isabel first; he always laughed at her jokes loudest, was quicker to take her hand or stroke her hair. Not that he didn’t do those things with Linda, too. But it always felt like sloppy seconds, even if-and maybe because-he didn’t mean it to be.

She pushed the door and it swung wide and slow with a mournful creeking. Her sinuses began to tingle with some foreign smell that wafted out-something metallic, something sweet. The scene revealed itself in snapshots: a cigarette still burning in an ashtray, a nearly empty bottle of liquor and a toppled glass, a frozen, mocking smile, a dark swath down the white of his shirt, a pistol on the ground. Everything existed in a separate frame, nothing coalesced. It was too dark to see the gore. He’d put the gun beneath his chin, an inefficient way to end your life, better at the temple where there’s no margin for error.

At the time, she’d fixated on the cigarette. She’d never seen her father smoke; it seemed like an insult, a dirty secret he’d kept. She was angry about it. But years later what she’d remember, what she’d dream about, was that smile. She’d never seen that look on him in life, that derisive grin, that “Fuck you, world” expression. But maybe it had been there all along, waiting for the veil to fall away.

There was a red wash of terror, mingling with rage that felt like a cramp; feelings she barely understood then as adrenaline rocketed through her frame. She wasn’t much older than Emily was now, and younger in many ways, less sophisticated, more sheltered. Nothing had ever prepared her for the sight before her; it was so utterly incomprehensible that it was nearly invisible. They’d find her vomit beside the door in the morning; that’s how they’d know she’d seen him first. She remembered a wash of numbness, a kind of internal powering down.

A dream, she told herself. I’ll close the door and go back to bed. In the morning, I’ll have forgotten this.

She told herself this with absolute conviction. In that walk from the shed, through the back door to the house, where she stepped out of her wet sneakers and wiped her feet dry on the mat, up the stairs and back into her own bed, she could believe that the power of her will might bend reality. She lay in a deep state of shock, mercifully blank until the sun rose and her sister stirred. She told her sister about her dream.

“Dreams can’t hurt you,” Isabel said.

Then Margie’s screaming, a horrible keening wail, cut through the silence of morning, ending the world as they all knew it.

Why should she want to think about that? What good did it do? But there it was, as her children slept in the hospital bed next to Fred’s, wrapped around each other like a couple of monkeys. Trevor snored lightly. Every now and then Emily would issue a low moan or a deep sigh. Fred looked so still and pale that a couple of times she’d gotten up and leaned over him to detect his shallow breathing.

Margie would be on a plane by now, on her way home. Linda had promised to wait at the hospital until her mother arrived. The kids didn’t want to leave her to go to Erik’s mother, so she’d made them as comfortable as she could. She was a little surprised when they drifted off quickly, clinging to each other.

Linda sat in an uncomfortable chair, staring at the ugly orange glow from the row of parking lot lampposts. It was a starless night, the moon nowhere to be seen. Another night when there would be no sleep. She would sit vigil, bear witness to whatever came next alone. Hours had passed since last she’d heard from Erik. She knew his phone was dead because her calls went straight to voice mail; the charge had been low when he left the hospital hours earlier. He had Isabel’s phone but that, too, went straight to the recorded message, her sister’s light, airy “Leave a message. I’ll call you back.” A sick dread had settled into her chest. Worry gnawed on her innards. Where were they?

The fresh rush of anxiety caused her to step out into the hallway and dial Ben. She didn’t worry about disturbing him or arousing the suspicions of his wife. She knew if he wasn’t able to take the call, he wouldn’t. But he answered on the first ring.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was soft, warm, and just the sound of it brought tears to her eyes. Was it just this morning that they’d been together, romping in a public restroom? Was it today that she promised herself she’d never see him again?

“Hey,” she whispered, looking around. The hallway was empty. Somewhere a radio played “Silent Night” very softly. “Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. “Everything okay?”

“Not really,” she said, leaning against the wall. “Not at all.”

“Tell me.”

She glanced at the clock on the wall over the empty nurses’ station. It was late, nearly ten.

“Where’s your family?” she asked. Once, she’d been talking to him, flirting with him, talking sexy, and they were interrupted when his daughter asked him for some milk.

“Daddy, milk in cup?” she’d said sweetly. She was so little, maybe two, just starting to put words together in her own way.

She’d hated herself in that moment, felt so dirty and foolish. She didn’t want a repeat. He didn’t say anything for a second, and she thought they’d lost the connection. Then she heard him breathing, remembered how his breath felt on her neck that morning.

“They’re home,” he said. Then: “I’m not.”

“Where are you?”

“I left,” he said, solemn, final.

She remembered how he looked this morning. So sad and lost.

“Ben.”

“I know, Linda. You don’t have to say it.”

“I can’t-” she started. “I don’t feel-”

“I know,” he said. Was there an edge to his voice? Something angry? When he spoke again it was gone. “But that’s not the point. I can. And I do feel for you enough to leave my marriage and my kids. And that’s not fair to anyone, is it?”

She put her head in her free hand. Why was everyone always going on about what was fair? What about life or marriage or having kids was fair? When did happiness become the goddamn Holy Grail? Didn’t you sometimes have to put up with a little bit of unhappiness for the sake of other people-like your kids, for instance? Who never, by the way, asked you to bring them into the world to put up with your issues?

“When did you do this?” she asked. She found herself disappointed in him, somehow less attracted to him for his having left his family.

“Yesterday.”

She understood it now, his arrival at her doorstep, the desperate lovemaking. “Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”

“You were so worried, so distracted. I didn’t want to add to your problems.”

“I’m sorry, Ben.” She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for, or if it was an apology at all. Maybe it was more an expression of her sorrow at the situation they’d put themselves in.

“You love him, don’t you?” he said, issuing a dry cough as though the words caused him physical pain. “Your husband.”

Erik had wept today when he told her what he had done. She’d never seen him that way. She’d sat close to him and held him, rubbed the back of his neck like she did for the kids when they were upset-even though she could have righteously been screaming at him, even hitting him. She was so angry with him, so frightened about the future now. His actions had stripped them of something vital to her sense of well-being, their financial security. He’d deceived her, gone behind her back and gambled with their future. Just like her father had done to her mother. It sickened her to think that her whole life had been spent trying not to be like Margie and yet here she was. But as angry as she was at her husband, as stung as she was by what he’d done, she realized that she could never stop loving him, any more than she could stop loving Em or Trevor, or Isabel. It was that kind of love.

“I do, Ben,” she said. “You know that. I’ve always been honest with you.”

In the heavy silence that followed, she could feel how her words hurt him. Her cheeks started to burn-from shame or anger, she couldn’t say.

“I should go,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called at all.”

“You needed to talk,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Take care of yourself.” Did she sound cold? She knew she did. She couldn’t help it.

“Linda, wait-” She heard his voice, but she pretended she didn’t, and pressed End, anyway. A second later, the phone, ringer off, started vibrating in her hand. It was him, calling her back. She pressed the button on the side of the phone that sent the call to voice mail and shoved it in her pocket. She slipped back into the darkened room and walked over to the window.

Trevor, Emily, and Fred all slept peacefully, their breathing a chorus of whispers-a high note, a low note, the rumble of a snore from Fred. A freezing rain started to fall, the icy flakes scratching at the window. Worry started up again, a restless anxiety that they were out there, Erik and Isabel, unreachable. She was momentarily distracted by the frame of the window, how the rain made crystalline images on the glass, how the orange glow she thought was ugly before looked golden now as it reflected off the rain. The rectangle of light from the door behind her was luminescent on the window, looked like a doorway to another place and time. She judged the light too low for the effect she’d want but itched for her camera just the same. Then she saw something that made every nerve ending in her body freeze solid like the ice on the glass.

A black Mercedes idled beneath one of the lampposts, its exhaust pluming up from behind, a filthy gray breath in the cold. She knew the car well, the dent and scratch on the driver’s side door, the custom rims he couldn’t really afford. She’d wept and laughed and made love and confessed in that car.

She saw the shadow of him in the driver’s seat; saw a bouncing orange point of light, the burning ember of a cigarette. It was Ben.

Was he out there watching her, waiting for her? Had he followed them here? She had been here for hours-had he been here all that time?

The phone started to vibrate in her pocket. She took it out to look at the screen.

Ben calling.

16

The cackling was really starting to grate on him. It sounded desperate and yet somehow cruel at the same time. He had observed women like this-wondering if it was a purely urban America phenomenon-older, the wrong side of forty, emaciated, their faces hardened masks, as if permanently set against the straining of vigorous exercise. Their small breasts looked flat and hard, their nails were square and deeply lacquered. They were often rude, crass, wearing their slim bodies like some passport for poor behavior. But despite all the deprivation, the starvation, the overexertion, they were still unattractive to the point of being repellent, with nasty sneers and cutting comments. They were still lonely, unhappy, unsatisfied-and hence bitter and mean.

Grady Crowe thought that American women had been sold a concept that failed them miserably. Spend every free moment of your time fretting about your body, the media urged, exercise, buy diet books, primp, preen, pluck, wax, and a man will find you attractive and love you forever. Don’t ever for one second worry about being loving or lovable, about kindness or finding fulfillment on some spiritual level. Just try to take up as little space as possible, be as small as possible, or you will be reviled and ridiculed by every industry posed to make a dime off of you-the fitness and publishing industries, even the medical industry. They’ll steal your money and your self-esteem. You’ll give it all and still be unhappy. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, they bought these ideas, believed whole-heartedly, built lives and lifestyles around them.

The cackling continued; Grady couldn’t hear himself think. He stared at Camilla Novak’s body and wanted to feel the scene, wanted to take in all the details, but he couldn’t. Erik Book sat head in hands on the sofa, trying to call out on his cell phone and finally giving up. He looked miserable. Grady wondered what it would be like to have five hundred grand to lose; he couldn’t muster too much sympathy for the loss of funds. But he wondered if the guy knew his wife was cheating on him. He could see it in her, something restless, something deeply unsatisfied.

He recognized it in hindsight in Clara, the way she had stopped looking at him in the same way. How she almost imperceptibly didn’t want to be held, how she slipped her hand from his grasp when they were out. He thought it was just the normal cooling of their years together. Yet another error in judgment. Like the one that caused them to go to Charlie Shane’s dump of a studio rather than to seek out Camilla Novak as Jez suggested. If they’d come here, maybe she’d still be alive. Shouldn’t he have better instincts than this? Lately it was just one mistake after another.

He took Camilla’s hand in his, feeling its weight, the delicacy of her bones through his gloves. He peered at a faint blue mark, a club stamp. He could just barely make it out: The Topaz Room. Never heard of it. He pulled out his cell phone and opened the Web browser, entered the name into the search engine. There was a listing up in Queens. He bookmarked it and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

More cackling, louder, more grating. He walked over to the CSI team; they all turned to look at him.

“There’s a dead woman here, show a little respect.” The cackler twisted her dried-up face at him.

“She can’t hear us, Detective,” she said nastily.

“But I can. So how about you keep your voice down?”

It wasn’t uncommon for a crime scene to be a place where people laughed and made jokes, disrespecting the victim with nasty remarks. It was the general understanding that this was how cops coped with the horror of it all. But Grady didn’t like it, especially in a nice girl’s apartment. It was one thing in the Bronx, where a bunch of perps had shot one another up. But a girl like Camilla, living alone in the city, working, like any of his sisters. She deserved more respect. He’d make sure she got it.

“I can’t think,” he said to Jez.

“Let’s go out in the hall for a second.”

He followed her out and she leaned against the gray wall. She fished a pack of Chiclets out of her purse, shook some into his hand, and popped a few in her mouth. She used to smoke a bit, not all the time. Just when she was really stressed. Now she chewed gum.

“She was kind of our only lead,” said Jez after a minute of chewing.

“There’s still Charlie Shane.”

“Shane, who is missing, whose apartment yielded nothing.”

Grady leaned against the wall, so they were shoulder to shoulder. Well-shoulder to arm; he was a full head taller than his partner. He wondered if he should acknowledge that she had been right, that because they did what he’d suggested, they were screwed. He just couldn’t. It lodged in his throat.

“Okay, so according to Book,” he said instead. “He came here looking for Isabel to convince her to turn herself in. He found her here with the body. She told him that Marcus Raine had killed Camilla, that she’d just seen him.”

“How’d Book get in?”

“He said the street door was ajar. He walked right in, came up the stairs.”

Jez took a few thoughtful chews, pulled a pen from her pocket and started that tapping thing she did. “But Book didn’t pass Raine on the way out,” she said, tap, tap, tapping the pen on her thigh. “And the only other exits-on the roof and in the back-are fire doors that would have set off alarms.”

Grady started picking at the scab on his knuckles. It wasn’t quite ready to be removed, stung a bit; a little drop of blood sprang from the wound. “So he heard Book on the stairs and hid until he’d passed.”

“Or Raine was never here.” Jez hadn’t looked at him, but she fished a small packet of tissues from her other pocket and held it out to him.

He took one and dabbed gingerly at his hand. The pattern of blood on the tissue brought to his mind blooming poppies in driven snow. “I don’t see Isabel Raine as a killer.”

Jez lifted and dropped her shoulders quickly, started tapping again. “Anyone can become a killer if the motivations are there.”

Grady knew her theory on this, but he disagreed. He thought it required a special kind of ego-sickness to take a life, a core belief that your needs, your survival took precedence over all others. Unless it was a question of self-defense or to protect another, he believed you had to be at least a borderline sociopath to kill another person. Even if someone is overcome with rage, it takes amazing arrogance to kill. He didn’t see that in Isabel. He saw arrogance, but not that particular brand.

“Camilla Novak was the last link to the original crime,” Jez said. “Without her we don’t have any live leads. Only the cold-case file. Someone knew that.”

“There might be something in her apartment,” said Grady. “We don’t know.”

“We won’t find anything there,” she said quickly. He knew she was thinking of the Raines’ apartment and the office where every scrap of important paper and data had been removed. “If there was anything, one of the Raines took it.”

“One of the Raines? You really think she could be a part of this.”

Jez snapped the gum in her mouth, looked up and down the hallway. “Where would Marcus Raine hide? If he heard Book coming?”

Grady glanced around. A typical downtown building with old tile floors and high ceilings, gray walls, hard stone stairs. “He could have gone up a flight,” he said. “Come back down when Book entered the apartment.”

Jez tilted her head to the side, walked over to the banister and gazed up the stairwell. She gave a reluctant nod.

“After Book came inside, Isabel Raine left,” Grady said, “claiming she’d find her husband and make things right for her sister’s family.”

“And he just let her go?”

“What was he going to do? Physically restrain her?”

“It wouldn’t have been a bad idea. She’d look less guilty if she stuck around. Did she take anything with her?”

“Erik Book says no.” Grady was skeptical. He felt that Book was holding back, wanting to protect his sister-in-law-or maybe his own interests. At the moment, people who looked like victims yesterday weren’t looking as innocent today.

“But where’s Novak’s purse? Coat’s on the couch, like she was getting ready to leave,” Jez asked.

Grady shook his head slowly. “No purse, no cell phone, no keys, no wallet in the residence.”

“Someone took her bag.”

“Seems so,” he said. “Did you see the stamp on her hand?”

“She’s a hot, single woman living in New York City. Of course she has a club stamp on her hand.”

“Yeah, but the club’s in Queens.”

Jez wrinkled her nose. “Queens? That’s weird. No self-respecting Manhattanite goes to Queens to party.”

More laughter wafted out the apartment door, and Grady felt a fresh wave of annoyance and frustration. He tried to tamp it down, didn’t want to lose his temper. He was already getting a reputation.

“I really don’t like that woman,” Grady said.

“You don’t like anyone,” Jez replied with a patient smile.

“I like you.”

“I guess that makes me one of the lucky few who meets with your approval. Do you ever think you might be a little too judgmental?”

“I’m a cop.”

“My point exactly. You’re supposed to have an investigative mind, not a mind like a steel trap.”

“More insults from my partner.”

She pulled a face of mock sympathy. “Think of it as tough love.”

He gave a little chuckle, thought about making a comment about his ex, but Jez’s earlier admonitions still rang in his head.

“Women don’t usually cut each other’s throats,” he said after a beat. “That’s an intimate act. And one that takes tremendous strength. You need to immobilize the person with one arm, draw the knife across her throat with the other.” He mimed the action.

“Or it’s an act of trust,” Jez said. She leaned in quickly, close to him, brought the tip of her index finger to his throat and drew it quickly across. She moved back to the wall. “You wouldn’t let a stranger near enough to cut your throat, unless you were overpowered. Camilla Novak let her killer in, let him get very close to her.”

He remembered something Isabel Raine had told him at the hospital. “Isabel Raine said that her husband had had an affair. She said it was a couple of years ago, that she never knew with whom.”

“Maybe it was Camilla Novak.”

“Which gives both husband and wife possible motive here.”

“And provides another connection to the missing Marcus Raine.”

“So, what now? Our best leads missing and dead.”

“We need to find out where all that money went. We follow it. It’s easy enough for people to disappear, but money always leaves a trail.”

“Already on it,” Jez said. “Warrant issued, records subpoenaed. We should have everything first thing tomorrow.”

“And what about cell phone records, for both of them?”

Jez rolled her eyes at him. “What am I, a rookie? And by the way, you could do some of this stuff every once in while, instead of walking around looking tortured and complaining that you can’t think, trying to feel the scene.” She waggled her fingers at him. “You’re like a character cop, an idea of yourself.”

“Any more insults for me today? Let’s just get them all out of the way now.”

“Not insults, Crowe. Just observations. Don’t be so sensitive.” She gave him a sly smile, knew that she was getting to him and enjoying the hell out of it. “I’m just trying to get you to keep your feet on the ground.”

“You don’t give me a chance,” he said, sounding a little peevish even to his own ears. “You’re all over this stuff. Anyway, you’re better at getting things like that done. People listen to you.”

“Hmm,” she said, moving back toward the apartment.

“Let’s get a photo of Marcus Raine the second and make a visit to Red Gravity, see if anyone there recognizes him.”

“If it survived the dot bomb. A lot of those little tech companies didn’t make it.”

“Worth a shot.”

“Another thing that’ll have to wait till morning.”

Grady looked at his watch; it was close to ten P.M. The morning seemed a long way off. He didn’t think they could wait around on banking and cell phone records, offices that might or might not still exist.

“What till then?” he asked.

She turned back to him. “We go door-to-door and let everyone tell us they didn’t see or hear anything. Then I say we take Erik Book in and talk to him a little more. I don’t think he’s telling us everything.”

“And when he lawyers up-if he hasn’t already-how ’bout we do a little clubbing?”

“You read my mind.”

I WAS FEARLESS once. I remember this. I remember being so sure of myself, of my opinions, passions, and goals. I remember raging and debating in my classes at NYU-politics, literature, history. Everything seemed clear. Everyone with a different opinion was simply wrong. There wasn’t one event that changed this, not that I remember.

But as I grew older, that passionate certainty faded. I became more reserved, more reticent. My righteousness was less assured. I avoided the kind of heated political debates that I once enjoyed. Existential, religious, moral arguments made me uncomfortable. There were so many opinions, so many convinced of their own righteousness. A slow dawning that the world was impossibly complicated, that differences were too often irreconcilable, made me less inclined to do battle.

I saw this mellowing in Linda, too. After our father’s suicide, she was so angry. And she stayed angry-angry at him, at our mother, at Fred, at anyone who crossed her or disrespected her. She was always embroiled in some argument with this one or that, fought with clerks in various shops, waitresses, massage therapists, over any little issue. Once I had to drag her, screaming over her shoulder, from a gay sing-along bar in the Village after she fought with a drag queen over I can’t even remember what. I was pretty sure it was about to come to blows.

But when Erik came into her life, something in her shifted and settled. “He removed the thorn from her paw,” Fred said in his usual quiet way. Emily’s arrival calmed her still more. By the time Trevor came on the scene, she seemed as serene as a monk. I’d arrive at the loft and find the place in chaos-dishes in the sink, the floor a gauntlet of baby gyms, cloth blocks, and teddy bears-and Linda peacefully lying on the living room carpet, holding up a set of keys in the light for Trevor, or reading to Emily from a towering stack of books.

“I just don’t have the energy, Isabel,” I remember her telling me one afternoon. I was at the loft, and she mentioned a bad review she’d received. The reviewer had called her work “common” and “maudlin.” No one likes a bad review. But Linda could be expected to go off the deep end, sulking for days, making complaining phone calls to editors, writing nasty “reviews” of her reviews and sending them to the critic. But that afternoon, she just seemed to shrug it off.

“I can’t afford my own temper tantrums anymore. You owe them something, you know. These kids, you bring them into the world. They didn’t ask for it; you did it for all your own reasons, good or bad. The least you can do is not be a bitch all the time, someone who’s always in a rage, or complaining, or depressive.”

I saw the simple wisdom in this.

“I mean, look at them,” she said, pointing to Trevor, who toddled about in his diaper, putting random large, colorful objects in his mouth. “We were all that. Every rude jackass on the street or maniac killer or corrupt politician was walking around in someone’s living room with a wet diaper, chewing on rubber keys or something. When you understand that, it’s so much easier to be forgiving than it is to be angry all the time.”

I wondered but didn’t say, When you lose that youthful assurance, that arrogance, what else goes with it? Your passion, your drive, that hunger to create? When motherhood seemed to demand so much time, energy, love-when an uninterrupted night’s sleep was something to celebrate-wouldn’t the artist be sacrificed?

But no. It was harder for her to work, certainly. I watched her struggle for time, for the mental space she needed to see. There was so much conflict in the artist mother; Linda was eloquent in her angst.

“I never knew that loving them, being a mother would occupy such a huge space in my heart. That there wouldn’t be much room for anything else.” But ultimately her work had more depth, more beauty than anything she’d ever done before Trevor and Emily.

I was comforted by this when I realized I was pregnant-something about which I’d been deeply ambivalent. I’d missed my period. The drugstore test confirmed my fears. I spent a full week buffeted by joy and abject terror, angst and excitement before I told Marcus.

The look on his face when I delivered the news was a low point in our marriage. A cool, half smile. Was I joking? Then, when he realized that I wasn’t, a strange blankness, a total withdrawal from me, from the scene. He crossed his arms across his chest and walked over to the window.

“It’s not a good idea, Isabel. It’s not…” He let the sentence trail with a bemused shake of his head.

“It’s not an idea, Marcus. It’s a person.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. More than any other moment, this was the moment that should have sent the alarms jangling. But, of course, I couldn’t have seen anything then through the veil of my anger and disappointment.

Now, as I sat on a rocking subway car hurtling uptown, I realized he wanted to tell me then. He wanted to confess. That was the pleading I saw on his face when he turned to look at me.

“Listen…,” he began. I lifted a hand, terrified of the words that were coming.

“Don’t. Don’t say something you won’t be able to take back.”

I thought he was going to tell me to end the pregnancy. And I couldn’t have those words written between us, alive and gnawing at our marriage like rats in the attic. You’d try to kill them, but they’d always be up there scampering, scratching, crawling in through any hole they found. But maybe he wasn’t going to say that at all; maybe he was going to tell me everything I was finding out now, the hard way.

I am a person lulled to calm by moving vehicles. The subway, even with all its filth and myriad threats, is no different. My memories and the present moment mingled in a semi-dream state. I wasn’t sleeping-I was way too wired for that; it was more a kind of restless doze. Though I was aware of the rumble of the train, the stops as they came and went, I was back there in our kitchen. I could smell the marinara that simmered on the stove, hear the music from the stereo in the living room, feel the cold granite of the countertop beneath my hands.

“Don’t make me hate you,” I said.

He looked at me quickly, startled as though I’d slapped him. I wanted to. I wanted to pummel him, scream at him. And I might have if I didn’t suspect he’d just stand there, stoic, accepting my blows.

“What do you think it means to be a parent?” he asked. There was a musing quality to his tone, as if he wasn’t quite looking for an answer. I answered, anyway.

“I think it means you stop living only for yourself,” I said. “I think it means you experience a different kind of love.”

It sounded lame, defensive, even to my own ears. He gave me a long look.

“But what if it doesn’t mean any of that?” Something in his eyes made me shiver. “What then?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know as well as I that not everyone loves their children.”

I felt a wave of nausea, the debut of a tension headache. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He shook his head, pressed his lips into a tight line. I have such clarity on this moment now, but then I was mystified, despairing. All I could think was, He doesn’t want our child. He doesn’t think he could love a baby.

I knew he’d be nervous, afraid. I expected him to be as ambivalent as I had been. But in my center I believed that, like me, under the current of all that surface intellectual confusion there would be a deep well of love and desire for a child. His frigid withdrawal, the draining of color from his face, the physical retreat-I see it now as the beginning of an end that was still too far off to perceive.

“Linda and Erik are happy,” I said.

“Really. You think so?”

“You don’t?”

“Is that what this about? Wanting what your sister has?”

“No,” I snapped. “Of course not. This conversation is not about what I want or don’t want. It’s about what is. I’m pregnant.”

“So you wouldn’t have chosen this?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

He gave me a smirk, a quick nod of his head. “That’s what I thought.”

I felt a rush of guilt, for not wanting this enough, for having it anyway, for now trying to convince Marcus it was a good thing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remembered Linda and Erik’s euphoria when they learned she was pregnant. They hadn’t planned Emily-or Trevor, either. But they were truly happy each time. I thought it would happen that way for us.

The light outside was growing dim and we hadn’t turned on the lights inside yet, so we were sitting in near darkness.

“Isabel,” he said, coming nearer to me.

I wrapped my arms reflexively around my middle. How fast you start thinking of that person inside you, how early you act to protect. I moved away from him, sat in a chair at the table.

“I think I understand your position well enough, Marcus,” I said, looking down at the floor. It was dusty, needed cleaning. “Let’s end this discussion before the damage can’t be undone.”

“There are so many things you don’t understand.” I didn’t like the sentence; it seemed hollow, clichéd. But I wasn’t in the mood to edit him.

“Then tell me.” I looked up at him, but he was staring out the window again, not connecting with me, not engaging in any way.

“I don’t remember my parents,” he said softly. “I don’t remember what it was like to be someone’s child.”

He wasn’t reaching out for reassurance with those words. He was closing a door. I sensed this, didn’t even bother saying any of the things that sprung to mind. After a few beats, he moved over to the switch and turned on the light. I squinted at the sudden change. He seemed about to say something else, but instead took the jacket that lay over one of the chairs.

“I’m going to take a walk. I need some air,” he said.

I lifted my palms. “Fine,” I said, feeling a valley of despair open within me. Of all the reactions I imagined, this was the worst-case scenario. Even anger would have been better than abandonment.

He left then and didn’t come back until much later. I didn’t call my sister. There were so many things I couldn’t tell her about Marcus; she was always so quick to judge him even without things like this. I thought about calling Jack, but it felt like some kind of betrayal. I just watched TV for a while, hoping Marcus would come back quickly. But it was hours, after midnight when I heard his key in the door. I was in bed with the lights off. I heard him come up the stairs, push softly into our room.

“Isabel,” he whispered from the doorway.

I didn’t answer, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I was so tired. I was relieved when I heard him go back downstairs and turn on the television. I made a point to leave early for the gym in the morning before he awoke and stayed away until after he’d gone for the day.

That night, he came home early from work with a gigantic teddy bear. He apologized and we pretended that everything was okay, normal. I wanted so badly to believe that he’d come around, I almost convinced myself. I tried not to notice that his smiles were forced, that his attentiveness just didn’t seem sincere.

Then, of course, a few weeks later there was the miscarriage. Soon after, the affair. And yet on the night before he disappeared we made love and shared croissants in the morning. Tragedy, betrayal mingling with the mundane of everyday life, a love that manages temporary amnesia masquerading as forgiveness to survive-is that the stuff of enduring marriages? Maybe just mine.

All these buried memories exposed to the light by his disappearance. I had fooled myself, thinking I was the one who saw more than others. I saw what I wanted to see, edited and rewrote the rest. I got off the train at East Eighty-sixth Street and emerged on Fifth Avenue. I was directly across town from my own apartment, separated by the expanse of Central Park. With a dead woman’s purse over my shoulder, weighted down by the first gun I’d ever touched, I felt so far away from my life that I might as well have been on the moon.

I passed the inverted ziggurat of the Guggenheim, its white expanse as vast and peaceful as a moonscape. I felt a twinge of longing to be meandering its downward spiral carefree and overwarm, gazing at the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the early Moderns. Artists gone but art remaining, peaceful and still, even if the creator’s spirit was anything but.

The neighborhood was quiet at night, the proximity of Central Park making it seem an airier neighborhood than other parts of the city. I would have felt perfectly safe on any other night. But that night I found myself looking over my shoulder at the sound of approaching footsteps, gazing at others on the street with suspicion. I dug my hand inside that strange tacky purse and rested it on the gun, feeling quite able to use it if necessary.

As I walked, all the events of the last-was it only twenty-four hours?-played in my mind: that horrible screaming on the phone, Fred’s blood pooling on the marble floor, the lovely Camilla, her throat cut. I had the cold realization that I was, as Trevor suspected, terribly out of my league. I thought about my sister, how worried she must be, how furious she’d be when she learned I pulled a gun on Erik. She’d know then how desperate and stupid all of this had made me. I had a moment of clarity, my footfalls sounding loud on the concrete in the quiet night; I should call Detective Crowe and tell him everything I’d learned, then call that lawyer, get in a cab and turn myself in. I should take all the good advice and help that had been offered and stop being an ass-for the sake of my family, if for not for myself. I stopped in my tracks and took Camilla’s phone from my right pocket, Detective Crowe’s card from my left. I could have dialed, ended it right then and there.

I thought of S, her mean, dead eyes and perfect body. Again, the rise of bile in my throat. Pure rage had a taste and texture that I was starting to recognize. I tucked the phone and the card away. I couldn’t let anyone else write the end to this story. I had to do it myself.

Don’t try to find me or to answer the questions you’ll have. I can’t protect you-or your family-if you do.

I could hear the sound of his voice in my head, as clearly as if he were beside me.

Protect me from whom? From your other self, this shadow that was living with me, sleeping in my bed for five years? Detective Breslow asked me if he’d had a history of mental illness. Maybe he did. How could I know? The man I saw in Camilla Novak’s apartment was my husband, the man I knew. Not some deranged madman who’d finally gone off the edge, not someone unrecognizable in insanity. It was him, perhaps merely, finally, unveiled.

I KEPT WALKING, turning left onto Eighty-eighth Street and moving past stately town houses until I reached the one I knew well. As I rang the bell, I thought, not for the first time: How in the world does he afford to live here? A three-story town home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? The Gold Coast. Unaffordable to any but the super-rich. Even the merely rich were just riffraff in this rarefied world. I’d been crass enough to ask once before.

“You made me rich,” he said. I laughed. Without Marcus’s income, I certainly wouldn’t have been living in an Upper West Side duplex. I’d still be in my apartment in the East Village.

“I haven’t even made myself this rich.”

“You do all right.”

“Seriously.”

I didn’t recall the answer now. It’s true that when he’d moved in that it was a skeleton of what it would become, with exposed rafters and wires, sagging staircases, water stains on the ceilings. He’d spent years restoring it, doing most of the work himself. Five years after closing, it was a showplace. Every time I came to see him, he was in the middle of some element of the restoration. It always reminded me of Fred, how he spent years fixing everything that was broken in our old house.

“They say a man who feels the need to build a house believes that he hasn’t accomplished enough with his life,” Jack told me. He was laying a hardwood floor in the upstairs hallway. I was sitting in the threshold to the bedroom, my feet up on the door frame and a beer in my hand-very helpful. I’d been married a year; Marcus was away on business. Or so I believed at the time. Who knows where he really was?

“Is that how you feel?” I asked him.

He brought the hammer down hard a couple of times, the sound echoing through still mostly empty rooms.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. I remembered our night together then. It came back in a vivid flash and I felt heat rise to my cheeks. I remembered his breath in my ear, I’ve always loved you, Isabel. What had I said to him in return? I didn’t remember.

“What about that woman you were seeing? An editor, right?”

“She thought I needed too much revision.”

My chuckle turned into a belly laugh and then we were both doubled over, tearing and clutching our middles.

Jack answered the door as quickly as if he’d been standing right behind it. He looked worried to the point of frantic.

“Christ,” he said by way of greeting, throwing his hands up in relief. “It’s almost eleven. I’ve been freaking out. Your sister’s been calling and calling.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked, stepping inside.

“That I hadn’t heard from you. She knew I was lying.”

He grabbed me by the arms and looked me up and down.

“You look awful,” he went on. “That bandage is bleeding through.”

I put my hand to it and realized it was wet. He dragged me down the narrow hallway to the large bathroom past the gourmet kitchen-all granite and stainless steel as if it lived in a showroom, gleamingly clean as is only possible for a man who eats takeout seven nights a week. I’d watched delivery men carry the granite in, helped Jack unwrap the appliances.

In the bathroom mirror, I saw what he saw and I almost wept. Awful wasn’t the word-wrecked, defeated, that same pasty-ill look that Ivan had. I remembered the wound on his chest, how his bandage was bleeding through, too. I felt a bizarre camaraderie for the big, unstable man.

“This is infected,” Jack said with a grimace as he removed the bandage. “Stay here.”

I sank to the floor as soon as he left, sitting on the plush bath mat and leaning against the wood vanity. I heard him pound up the stairs and then come back down a minute later. He knelt on the floor beside me. I cringed when I saw the peroxide in his hand, the mass of cotton balls, gauze, and antibiotic ointment. He dabbed some of the peroxide on a cotton ball. He was in his element-he was a caretaker, the fix-it guy.

What about Jack? My sister’s favorite question, asked after every dating snafu and failed relationship. He’s such a good guy. He cares about you. It’s obvious.

It’s obvious we’re friends. There’s nothing else but that.

That’s enough for a start. It’s not all lightning bolts and shooting stars.

You sound like Mom.

“Isabel,” Jack said, poised with a dripping ball of cotton, the scent of antiseptic heavy in the air. “This is really going to hurt.”

“Good,” I said. “I like consistency.”

He gave me a look that was somehow amused and compassionate and then ruthlessly went to work on my injury while I tried to be stoic, but couldn’t stop a flood of tears welling from a deep place within me.

Jack just kept saying, over and over, “I’m sorry, Iz. I’m so sorry.”

“WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Ben?”

Her breath came out in big clouds. She pulled her coat tightly around her.

“Get in the car,” he said softly, not meeting her eyes. “It’s cold.”

“Ben. I’m not getting in your car. My children are sleeping inside that building.” She turned around and pointed to the large white structure. She had an uncomfortable fluttering in her chest thinking of them sleeping a few stories up next to Fred’s hospital bed. Either of them could wake, walk over to the window, and see her standing in the parking lot, talking to a strange man in his car. There would be lots of questions she couldn’t answer.

He’d seen her exit the building; she could tell by the way he straightened his posture and checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. Did he think she’d be happy to see him here? Was he that delusional?

“Just for a minute. Please, Linda.”

She could smell the heavy, sharp odor of too many cigarettes smoked in close quarters. He looked tired, edgy, was listening to the blues. She wasn’t familiar with the song. A sad-voiced woman wailed about her lost man-her voice eerie, tinny, floating up to Linda’s ears.

“No, Ben. What are you doing here? Did you follow me?”

He nodded, looking sheepish but not ashamed. Almost as if he thought she might find it funny or charming. She didn’t.

“So that means you were sitting outside my building how long?”

“Since the coffee shop.”

She saw her own reflection in the back passenger-seat window, her expression, angry, incredulous.

“That’s not okay. That’s-that is-” She paused to compose herself. “That’s weird, Ben.”

She expected him to cow, to say he was sorry, to then drive off. Tomorrow she’d tell him that they couldn’t see each other any longer. Her family was in crisis and she needed to focus on them, refocus on her marriage. He’d see that it was the right thing. Maybe he’d go back to his family. But instead his face went still, the line of his mouth looked angry. He released a bitter laugh.

“I trashed my whole life for you, Linda. The least you can do is get in the fucking car.”

His words cut through the space between them, changing everything they were to each other. His tone was such a departure from anything she’d ever heard coming from his mouth that she looked at him hard for a second, hoping in a final moment of denial that he might be joking. He wasn’t.

“I never asked you to do that,” she said gently. She didn’t want to hurt or anger him any further than he obviously was already. She could feel his tension and it unnerved her. But she wanted, needed him to go away. “In fact, quite the opposite.”

“You didn’t have to ask!” he yelled, startling her. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he spoke again, he almost whispered. “In your heart, you know it’s what you want. I know that. I know you. That’s love, right? Knowing what the other person wants and giving it to them without their having to ask?”

He wasn’t looking at her. That was the weird thing. He was staring straight ahead as if she wasn’t even there. She felt the first cold finger of fear in her abdomen as he started an odd, rhythmic gripping and releasing of the wheel.

“Come on, Ben,” she said, forcing a coaxing gentleness into her voice. “Get some rest. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

He turned his head quickly and she saw the depth of his fatigue, a frightening glimmer in his eyes. She took an involuntary step back, afraid he was going to get out of the car. How had this happened? How did they get from where they were to this place?

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t sleep at all. I need you with me.”

She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, her whole body shivering with cold and fear. There was something really wrong. She’d never even seen a shade of this in him. But, she realized, they didn’t really know each other well. Sex is not intimacy. Not really. Though he seemed to think it was.

She forced a smile to soothe him, moved closer to the car and rested her hand on his arm. He seemed to relax a bit, seemed more like himself. Then: “I think she was glad, you know, relieved that the charade was over. Erik will be, too. He might be as unhappy as you are.”

She kept the smile on her face, even though his words almost made her knees buckle. She nodded. “You might be right. I’ll talk to him. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He smiled then, too, and put his hand on hers. “I’m going to make you really happy, Linda. You’ll see.”

“I know,” she said. “Just get some rest now. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

She backed away from him, then turned and started walking back toward the hospital. Everything in her wanted to run. Her heart was an engine in her chest.

“Linda.” The tone in his voice-cold, dead-stopped her. But she didn’t turn around.

“You tell him,” he said flatly. “Or I’m going to.”

She started walking more quickly and heard him call after her one more time. This time she didn’t stop until she was under the bright lights inside. She ducked quickly into the bathroom and held on to the sink until the quaking in her body subsided. Then she ran to the nearest stall and vomited-bile, water, coffee. She sank to the floor and rested her head against the mental divider.

The phone in her pocket was ringing then. She didn’t recognize the number but she answered it.

“Hey, it’s me.”

She’d never been so happy to hear her husband’s voice. He was so good. So safe. She knew his failings were nothing compared to her own.

“Hey,” she said, trying to sound normal, “what’s going on? I’ve been calling and calling.”

“My phone died.”

“Where are you?”

In a whisper he told her about Camilla Novak and Isabel’s flight.

“She did what?”

“I didn’t tell the police. She didn’t mean it. She was just trying to give me a real reason for letting her go. It’s not like she would have shot me.”

“Oh my God.” What was it with everyone coming apart at the seams? Were they all stretched that thin? Just a little adversity and everyone broke in two? “Where are you now?”

“The police brought me in for questioning. They’re treating me-I don’t know. They seem suspicious, like they think I’m holding back.”

“Are you?”

“Just about the gun. And the fact that she took Camilla Novak’s purse.”

“What? Why?”

“Um, I don’t know. She wasn’t very… communicative. She’s, you know, on a mission. She thinks she can fix everything.”

She issued a sigh that turned into a sob. It surprised her, the sheer force of it. She couldn’t have held it back if she wanted.

“Linda. I need you with me, okay?” His request echoed Ben’s demands, making her sob harder.

“Are you still at the hospital?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Take the kids to my mother’s. She’s expecting you. Then come to the precinct.” He gave her the address.

“I’ll have to leave Fred here alone,” she said. “I promised Mom I’d wait for her.”

“She’ll understand.”

She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her.

“Linda,” he went on, “we’re going to be okay.”

“I’ve made mistakes, too. Big ones,” she managed, wiping at her eyes, trying to catch her breath. She wanted to confess so badly, tell him everything right then. But there could hardly be a worse time.

“Just come here,” he said. He sounded strong, in control. He was always exactly what she needed him to be. “And call that lawyer.”

“Okay,” she said, standing up, pulling herself together. “I’m coming.”

She didn’t know if Ben was still idling in the parking lot, and if he was, how she’d get herself and the kids out without him seeing her. But she would.

She quickly splashed some water on her face and exited the bathroom. In the wide empty foyer, she saw a frail, worried-looking woman gazing about, confused. She wore a trim navy blue coat and was toting a suitcase on wheels. It was a split second before Linda realized it was her mother; she seemed so out of place in the context of the mess of her life somehow.

“Mom.”

“Oh, Linda,” Margie said with relief. “What in the world is going on?”

Margie seemed to take in the all the details of her daughter’s being, her tousled hair, the shadow of mascara under her eyes, the coffee stain on her coat-all the things Linda had just been focusing on in the mirror. Margie’s brow sunk into a deep frown.

“What,” she repeated, “in the world is going on?”

17

What surprised me the most about marriage was how quickly it settled, became not mundane, necessarily, but normal. After the euphoria of finding love, the magic of courtship, the thrill of engagement, the busy fun of planning a wedding, there’s the lovely honeymoon and then all the little pleasures of setting up house, putting away the extravagant gifts, adjusting to life as married people; we, not I, us, not me. Everything shines, everything is new and fresh. And then-it’s not as if it goes bad or sour, nothing like that. It’s just that it becomes normal in a way I didn’t expect. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Linda was a very canny tour guide.

“When you’ve really chosen well, when you really love your spouse, it’s not as if the fire dies precisely,” she told me one time. “It just goes from being an inferno to a pilot light. If you’re not vigilant, you won’t notice it until it’s gone out completely.”

“You and Erik still have romance,” I said.

“Yes, but we work at it. The main part of our life is our children and our work. I never go to dinner or the movies without some barely conscious worry of Trevor and Emily at the back of my mind. Sometimes when we make love, I’m wondering if he remembered to paid the electric bill.”

“Linda!”

A quick shrug, a flutter of the eyelids (so like Margie). “That’s married with children. It’s not as bad as it sounds from the outside.” She smiled the smile of the older, wiser sister. “You’ll see.”

Not me, I thought. Never us.

And it never was quite that way with Marcus and me-not sexually. Though we fell into that domestic rhythm of work, dishes, laundry, bills, he always excited me; I never thought about the electric bill when we made love. But then again, we never had children, leaving us free from that special kind of fatigue I saw in Linda and Erik after months, going on years, of spotty sleep and an endless monitoring of needs.

And then, of course, I never really knew Marcus. I was always sleeping with a stranger, maybe subconsciously never comfortable enough, never intimate enough to allow my mind to wander. Maybe it is the unknowing that excites passion within me, the desire to understand that keeps me interested. Maybe that’s why, even when things were bad-his apathy about the pregnancy and miscarriage, his affair-I stayed. Curiosity. Who are you?

JACK WAS TALKING, pacing the room like a preacher giving a sermon, hands waving, voice raised. I wasn’t listening; I was sinking into a deep well of self-pity. I felt a barren place inside me, a place where no life could grow, where no love could last.

He’d fed me a tuna melt and made me take my antibiotics and was now lecturing me on my stupidity, threatening to call the police, or physically drag me to the lawyer himself. Jack was prone to ranting. Something to do with being born and raised in Manhattan, this loudmouthed, totally self-assured dissertation on whatever.

“This is not some novel you’re writing, Isabel,” he concluded. “This is your life.”

“What’s the difference?”

He stopped moving and fixed me with his gaze. I don’t know how to describe Jack; he’s so familiar, it’s almost as if I can’t always see him. His dark hair was a careful mess, his darker eyes always kind, always in on the divine joke of it all. There’s an interesting shape to his nose, broken during a fistfight in high school and never healed quite right. He was fit, beefy, muscular in the way of someone who spends just enough time at the gym, soft in the way of someone who can’t quite give up the foods that bring pleasure.

“You’re telling me you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction.” His eyes rested accusingly on the cut he’d just bandaged, as if this might be the culprit responsible for my mental instability.

“Not at the moment.”

“Are you just being existential, tortured? Or have you officially walked over the edge?”

The edge: the outside limit of an object, area, or surface; a place or part farthest away from the center of something. Which edge did he worry I’d stepped off-the edge of sanity, reality, reason?

“Neither. If I were writing this, right now I’d be wondering what my heroine should do next. I’d be exploring the field of possibilities. Which is precisely what I intend to do.”

“In the real world there are consequences for mistakes, Isabel.”

“In fiction, too.”

“Fine,” he snapped, frustrated with me. “But no edits, no rewrites. In the real world? Consequences are a stone wall.” He smacked fist against palm for emphasis.

I turned away from him and stared at a huge engineer’s sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge that was framed and hung on the wall-precise lines and exact measurements, tiny hand-scrawled notes about cable lengths and river span. I’d always envied engineers their exacting spirits, their certainty of tools and craft, their faith that the world would be as it was measured. My world seemed so liquid by comparison, everything shifting and changing so often as to be incalculable.

Jack had a point. A good one, which drained what little was left of my energy. I returned to the place of doubt I’d visited on the street. I thought of Detective Crowe and his number in my pocket. Everyone I cared about and respected wanted me to turn myself in to the lawyer. Why was I being so stubborn? What did I think I was going to do?

“Your phone’s ringing,” I said, lying back and examining the high white ceiling, the ornate molding, the sleek track lighting-a lovely blend of original and modern features. He really had done a stellar job with the place. I noticed a hairline crack in the ceiling, some insect corpses behind the glass in the lamps. We both listened to the faint chirping of the phone.

He shook his head. “Must be yours. Mine’s right there.” He pointed his chin toward the slim black device on the granite countertop.

“It’s not mine. I tossed my phone.”

We both looked over at Camilla’s purse. It lay where I’d dropped it with my own on Jack’s leather couch. We looked back at each other. I dove for it. He dove for me.

“Don’t answer that,” he said, grabbing my arm.

“Why not?” I pulled away from him and reached for the bag. I rummaged through the contents, until I found it still ringing and vibrating at the bottom. It was hot pink, scratched and battered. The screen blinked, Blocked number. I flipped it open and turned to Jack, triumphant. He looked stricken, as though he’d just watched me walk over a ledge. Overreacting, as usual. I didn’t say anything, just listened.

“Camilla?” A man’s voice.

I thought about it a second. “Hi,” I said, after a beat. I tried to imitate her voice from what I’d heard in our brief conversation earlier. My voice just came out sounding strangled, strange. Jack was shaking his head, inching closer to me. I wondered if he was going to try to wrest the phone away from me. Then instead he blew out a breath and walked over to the refrigerator, pulled the door open angrily. It was completely empty except for a bottle of Gray Goose, a bottle of seltzer, and a bowl of limes.

“You’re late,” said the voice on the line.

His tone was gruff, accent thick. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t trying to be crafty. I just didn’t know how to best lead the conversation. I issued a cough, just to fill the silence that followed. Jack mouthed, Hang up the phone. He made a wide circle with his index finger at his temple. This is crazy!

“Well?” said the voice on the other line. The sound of traffic was loud behind him. A siren wailed nearby.

“I’m having some problems.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, counting on him not being able to hear me well.

There was a pause and I thought he’d caught on, that he’d hang up.

“But you’re coming?” he said finally.

I decided on silence again.

“I’ll wait-but not much longer. By the Children’s Gate, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have the files?” he asked then. “Am I wasting my time?”

I decided to end the call rather than respond. The voice on the line, harsh and unyielding though it was, had a desperate edge. Camilla had something he wanted; he was waiting, though she must have been very, very late. I thought of her lying there, bleeding out, of her cooling flesh.

Jack was drinking from a lead crystal lowball, ice chinking, eyes on me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. I realized I was still standing, staring at the phone in my hand.

“Do you have my money?” I asked, snapping back into the present.

The phone call had given me a little juice. The lethargy that was settling into my bones dissipated. I took Camilla’s purse and emptied the contents out onto the low coffee table.

“He said something about files,” I said.

Jack sat down across from me. I could see the curiosity on his face, though he wore a deep scowl. He was an agent, a broker of story-he loved a good one more than anyone else I knew.

A cheap lipstick, a bottle of glitter nail polish, a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Or half-unsmoked, if you’re an optimist.

“That depends,” he said, reaching for the tube of lipstick. He opened it and rolled the bottom until the little pink tip of makeup emerged. Then he recapped and tossed it back on the table.

Her tacky sequined wallet was overstuffed with singles and receipts-a nail salon, Taco Bell, a bookstore. A small black makeup bag containing more cosmetics-lip liner, mascara, a small black compact of blush.

“You have it or you don’t, Jack.”

A small plastic photo book, grimy in the way of something that’s been in your purse forever, well-thumbed. I flipped through the images, feeling a weight settle on me. Camilla smiled with an older woman, clearly a relative, probably her mother. Another young woman with Camilla’s eyes and nose, but darker, less pretty somehow, held a sleeping, wrinkled baby wrapped in a pink blanket. A little girl in pigtails and a blue corduroy jumper smiled, revealing an adorable gap in her teeth. There was a photo of a man I recognized as the missing Marcus Raine. He sat on a bed, holding a guitar, but looked directly at the camera with a smile. A man in love.

The rest of the contents-a bag of M &Ms, a cigarette lighter, a little notebook covered with hearts-littered the table. The detritus of a life. All the stuff she collected and bought and carried with her, things that were important to her. All now in the possession of a woman she’d never met, who’d stood over her dead body, touched her dead flesh, then took off with her belongings. If someone had told her that when she bought her M &Ms, what would she have thought?

I remembered the gun, took it from my pocket and put it on the table.

“Hey-whoa. What you doing with that?”

It was a small.38 revolver. I only knew this because a cop I’d interviewed once showed me a similar one. It was a gun cops often used as an off-duty piece, smaller, less conspicuous. It was light and perfect for a woman’s hand. My nephew would be pleased. You might need one, he’d warned, prescient.

“It was in her bag,” I said. “Are you going to answer me? Did you get my money?”

“So wherever she was going, she was going armed?” I could see it in his face: curiosity breaking and entering, making off with common sense.

He reached out and picked up what I’d thought at first glance was a small silver cigarette lighter. In Jack’s hand, I realized that it was a thumb drive, a tiny device that stored computer files. I reached for it quickly and he snatched it back.

“I heard the whole conversation,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

He probably did know what I was thinking. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He held the thumb drive up in the air.

“But what’s your agenda, your goal for this meeting?” he asked. “How will you recognize who you’re supposed to meet, and what will you do once you’re there?”

I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He should know this about me. He seemed to read it all on my face. He rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair.

“Let’s look at that drive. See what’s on it,” I said.

“We don’t have time,” he said, standing up. “And maybe it’s better if we don’t know.” He walked over to the closet and took out a distressed brown leather jacket and shrugged it on, pulled a stocking cap over his hair.

“It’s never better not to know. Trust me.” I held out my palm.

He ignored me. “Do you even know what the Children’s Gate is?”

I gave him a look. Mr. I Know Everything About New York City. It was a hobby of his; he was always explaining, correcting, pointing out items of interest. Sometimes it was cool; more often after our many years of friendship it was annoying.

“There are twenty gates to Central Park,” I said. “That one’s on Seventy-sixth and Fifth.”

He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, gave a deferential nod. “A-plus,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “We’re close. Let’s go and get this over with.”

How easily he slipped into the plot, became accomplice and co-writer.

“We have time to look at the drive,” I said. “If he waited this long, he’ll wait awhile longer.”

He paused another moment and I thought he was going to put up more argument. But instead he moved quickly to his office down the hall. By the time I caught up with him, he was already sitting at his computer with the drive in his USB port. It was a simple room, not yet finished. Just a shining glass desk and ergonomic black chair. Atop the glass sat an impossibly thin black laptop, a spindly halogen lamp. The walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. He was the only one in the world with more copies of my novels than I had. They lined his shelves-U.S. copies, foreign editions, trade paperbacks, mass market editions. All my stories, my imaginings bound, translated into languages I wouldn’t understand, my millions of words offered in neat packages. I saw my name in myriad typefaces and colors: Isabel Connelly. Not Isabel Raine. No, I was never that in print. The place where I was most real, most alive, most myself-on the page-I was never Isabel Raine. I felt a strange gratitude for that now.

“Pictures,” he was saying.

I came to stand behind him, feeling a bit wobbly, and steadied myself on his shoulder. Without looking at me, he stood and gave me the chair, keeping his eyes on the screen, his hand on the keyboard, flipping through what looked like fifty or sixty black-and-white photographs.

Four men stood in a loose group at the edge of a dock, hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Three of them wore long black coats. The water behind them was gray and choppy. The fourth appeared to be dressed only in a suit. His shoulders were hiked up in tension, arms wrapped around his middle obviously for warmth. In the next frame one of the coated men had a big hand on the arm of the suited man. In the next a gun appeared. Each frame-grainy, moody-was separated from the last by a matter of seconds. I could almost hear the rapid shutter clicks. The next frame zoomed in and with a start I recognized two faces-Marcus and Ivan. Ivan, the man with the gun. Marcus with his arm locked in another man’s grasp.

“Is that Marcus?” asked Jack, incredulous.

But I’d lost my voice. In my head I heard the screaming, that horrible keening, and all the hairs on my arms and neck started to rise. As Jack flipped through the frames, faster now, we watched as Marcus laid his hand across the hand on his arm and moved into a quick, hard, practiced twist that dropped the other man to his knees and left him on the ground, his mouth open in a scream. The camera caught a muzzle flash from Ivan’s gun, but in the next frame the gun was in Marcus’s hand. Each successive frame saw another man on the ground until it was just Marcus and Ivan surrounded by bleeding corpses. Two frames showed them standing there, Marcus holding the gun, Ivan with his hands up in supplication. In the next frame Ivan was on the ground. Marcus started rolling bodies into the river, the dock splattered with blood. Then it was just Marcus and Ivan again, the big man lying on his side writhing, his face a mask of pain, arms around his center, Marcus standing over him, the gun aimed at his brother’s head. He lowered the gun. The camera caught him walking away, Ivan’s mouth open in a scream of pain or rage or both.

“Izzy” said Jack, after a moment of us both staring at the screen. “Are you okay?”

I leaned forward and continued scrolling to watch Marcus walk, unhurried, up the dock and disappear between two large warehouses. He was wearing the suit he’d been wearing when he left me.

“He killed three people,” Jack said, his voice dropping to an amazed whisper. “Left the other one to die.”

I felt myself separating from a rising tide of emotion-grief horror, fear. I rafted it like a white-water current, otherwise I would have drowned.

“Where would you say that is?” I asked. He leaned in close and I could smell the scent of Ivory soap on his skin, mingling with the vodka on his breath. He put a finger on the screen. I saw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the distance.

“Brooklyn,” he said. “Somewhere between Bensonhurst and Coney Island.”

“You were right,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it. “We would have been better off not seeing that.”

“Always listen to your agent,” he said. He was trying to lighten things up a bit, but he just sounded sad and a little afraid.

I backed up the thumb drive on his computer, ejected and pocketed the small device. He stood by and watched me do it, folded his arms across his chest. I walked to the door and turned around to look at him.

“This is the point where I say you don’t have to come with me, that I don’t want you to. I want you to stay here and be safe, call the police if I don’t come back or call.”

He released a long, slow breath, held my eyes.

“I was hoping that this was the point where you realized you’re not writing this. That the tragedy and danger are real, that you’re grief-stricken and injured, that you need to lie down and let me take care of you.”

I smiled at the temptation. “If I did that, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

He nodded. “And if I let you go alone, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

He helped me on with my coat. I gathered Camilla’s things and put them in her bag, slipped the thumb drive in there, too, and slung it over my shoulder. I left my own bag behind, not wanting anything to happen to my last bit of cash, my passport and credit cards. I kept her gun in the pocket with Detective Crowe’s card. I put her cell phone in the other, noticing that the charge was low.

“Do you have my cash?”

“Not on my person. But I have it in the house, yes. We’ll talk about that later.”

I nodded, took the revolver out of my pocket one last time and did what I hadn’t yet done, looked to see if it was loaded. It was.

“Do you even know how to use a gun?” Jack asked.

“I do.”

He looked at me quizzically, skeptical.

“Research,” I said.

He opened the door for me and we walked out into the night.

“WHY DON’T YOU give it up, Crowe? Seriously, buddy. We’re going on two years here.”

Grady Crowe was sitting alone in the car outside the precinct. He’d dropped Jez off at the door, told her he’d park and be right up to deal with Erik Book. Book, as they suspected, had already contacted his lawyer and was refusing to say anything until he arrived. They’d had him ride in the back of a radio car with two uniformed officers, not cuffed, but not necessarily free to go, either. And Crowe suspected that Book was unsettled enough that he might turn on the charm and get a word or two out of him the nice way. Book seemed like a reasonable guy in over his head, maybe making mistakes out of fear, a desire to protect. He’d give him the “Look, you’re not a suspect, don’t need a lawyer, we just want to help” speech.

There were fewer parking spots on the street in front of the precinct than there were police vehicles, so he found a space in the back of the lot across First. With a few seconds alone in the car, he did what he’d been wanting to do all day: He called Clara’s cell.

She was still thinking about him. Her late-night call told him that. Maybe she wasn’t as happy with Keane as she thought she’d be. Big surprise there. He had a lofting feeling of hope in his center until Sean Keane, the man currently fucking Grady’s wife, answered her phone.

Grady stared ahead, his view a chain-link fence, a patch of overgrown grass and weeds, and the tall redbrick wall of the building adjacent to the lot. To his right was the outdoor basketball court where he and Keane used to shoot hoops after a rough shift to blow off steam. Around the corner was the bar where they’d grab a beer and a burger. They’d bitch about their wives. When they were friends, more than once he’d thought, with a twinge of envy, that Keane was a really good-looking guy. Lean and muscular, sandy-blond hair and strong jaw, jewel-green eyes with girlish lashes. All the girls in the precinct brushed the hair out of their eyes, smiled too much, laughed too loudly when he was around. Stupid. If they knew what a dog he was, those smiles wouldn’t last long.

Little did Grady know that Sean would one day be making Clara smile and so much more. He saw them talking at the Christmas party. He noticed the way she tilted her head and twirled a strand of her hair. They’d fought about it, actually.

You shouldn’t be flirting at my fucking Christmas party. It’s unbecoming.

Yeah? Maybe if you stayed with me, acted like my goddamn husband, I’d be flirting with you.

But that was a long time ago. “I would, buddy” he said, mocking Keane’s use of the word. “I would let it go. Except your fiancée keeps calling me.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line and Grady felt a rush of satisfaction. “All the shiny and new rubbing off? Underneath just the same old thing?”

Sean didn’t give him the benefit of a reaction, but Grady heard his voice tighten when the other man spoke again.

“Give it up, Crowe. The wedding’s in a week.”

“Yeah. And a year from now, you’re going to find yourself on another bar stool bitching about Clara the way you bitched about Angie.” He let a beat pass. “Hey, how’s that boy of yours? Missing his daddy?”

The line went dead and Grady enjoyed a moment of self-righteous glee. He was the injured party, the one who’d kept his vows-he liked lording that over them. It comforted him. Clara and Sean hurt a lot of people to be together; he hoped they lost a little sleep over it.

But after a moment, the rush of pleasure passed and he felt lower than he had before, which was pretty low. Now Clara would be upset with him for betraying her to Sean. If she called again, it would be in anger and disappointment. She’d phoned him in a vulnerable moment and he used it to hurt her. He wished he could take it back, what he’d said. He wished he’d protected her instead of offering her up to get his licks in with Keane.

One of Clara’s more memorable cuts came back to him: You’re not even adult enough to be someone’s husband. What kind of father would you be?

“Shit.” He almost hit the dash, but his fist still ached from the last miserable phone call. “Shit.”

By the time he’d cooled down and was entering the precinct, Jez was exiting.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “The lawyer is already here. What took you so long, anyway?”

“I was looking for parking,” he said lamely.

She seemed skeptical but stopped short of giving him a hard time again. Instead she patted him on the back to get him moving.

“Well, let’s roll,” she said. “When’s the last time you went dancing?”

“So long ago, I don’t even remember what it feels like.”

She gave a little grunt. “Join the club.”

18

I had this nervous tick of using my thumbnail to tug at the back of my wedding ring. Of course, every time I tried to do this, I was reminded that the ring was gone.

I never had a traditional wedding band, always hated the idea of that for some reason-as though it was some kind of bond to the normal, the common idea of marriage. The ring Marcus gave me at our engagement, a ruby set in a platinum band, was the only jewelry I wore. I loved its glinting red fire, the simple beauty of a single gem, something pure mined from the earth. Not flashy but stately. Not for show, for real. Of course, it was all flash, all show, none of it real. And the ring, like everything else, was gone.

“It’s all I have from my mother, from my past. I don’t know how she came to have this. But my aunt gave it to me when I left for the states. I had it set for you. It’s yours.”

I wanted to know more about the gem, about his mother. But his memories, he said, were fuzzy. He remembered a smiling face framed in curls, a wafting scent of lemon verbena. That was all. Of his father, there was nothing at all. It was terribly unsatisfying for a fiction writer, to be deprived of the texture and details of my husband’s history. I imagined that the ruby had been given to his mother by a man she loved, maybe not Marcus’s father, maybe a gypsy from Romania, and that she’d kept it hidden, maybe sewn inside a coat. She never looked at it, but took great comfort in thinking of its flame, that passionate blood red. It reminded her of love. I imagined that somewhere she was pleased to know the ruby was out in the light, on the hand of a woman her son loved and married. I kept these fantasies to myself. He didn’t like to talk about the past, grew stiff and cold. I used to think it was because it caused him too much pain, but more likely it was because it was too much effort to keep all the lies straight.

“What are you thinking about?” Jack walked on my left, the park yawning to the right.

“My ring. It’s gone. Someone took it.”

“I’m sorry. I noticed. I thought maybe you took it off.” There were running footfalls behind us and both of us startled, turned only to be passed quickly by a rail-thin young woman wearing headphones and breathing too hard. We started walking again.

“How could this have happened?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just gave a slow shake of his head. We were moving fast, both of us nervous, unsure what we were heading into, or why, or what we were going to do when we got there.

“You didn’t like him. Neither did Linda. Okay. But this? Did you imagine this?”

“Linda didn’t like him?” He seemed pleased.

“Jack,” I snapped. “Answer me.”

“No. Not this. Of course not. Who could imagine this?” He took a few long strides so that he was in front of me, then turned around, stopping me. The Children’s Gate was just two blocks away now. He held out a hand.

“Give me the gun,” he said, sounding practical, assured. He was the man, he should be holding the gun. That simple.

“No,” I said, pushing past him. He grabbed my arm and didn’t let go even when I struggled.

“Jack,” I said, feeling anger, too much anger, rise in my chest, a kind of free fall in my belly. “Let go of me.”

I tried to wrest my arm from him, but he held fast.

“I mean it,” I said. “Let go.”

“Calm down, Isabel,” he said gently. “Look. It’s me.”

I looked at his face and my anger burned out. Just the eye contact calmed me, and I was aware of how rigid my body was, stiff at the shoulders, arm muscles tensed.

“We need a plan, a course of action.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“We have no frame of reference. Nothing like this has ever happened to either one of us.”

We were moving again, Jack still holding tight to my arm as though he thought I might try to bolt. “We need to decide what to say at least,” he said reasonably.

And then it was too late. We both saw him, standing against the low stone wall. Just the look of him, furtive, anxious, told me that he was the one waiting for Camilla Novak. I was sure of it.

Jack and I separated. He kept so close behind me, I could feel him at my back. I look back at this moment now and think how foolish we were. New Yorkers think we own the world, that our proximity to reported crime-even if we are as pampered and sheltered as children in a nursery-makes us savvy and street smart. We believe our own international reputation as tough, rude, no-nonsense. We think we can grab a gun and confront some nameless thug on the street.

I walked right up to the stranger, who raised his eyes from the concrete to look at me. He was short, balding. His face was pockmarked and ruddy from the cold. His eyes had a kind of lazy menance, a dim nastiness.

“Camilla Novak is dead,” I said simply. My hand was on the gun in my pocket. “Now I have what you want.”

He looked at me blankly, pushed himself off the wall. His eyes darted toward Jack, back at the bulge in my pocket. He was making a threat assessment.

“I have some questions,” I went on arrogantly. “If you answer them, I’ll give you the files.”

Clumsy? Yes. Short-sighted? Sure. Of all the scenarios that had played out in my mind-a struggle, some kind of slick conversation in which I got what I wanted, even though I had no idea what that was, my actually firing the weapon, him cowering in fear, him attacking me-what happened next was a surprise. There was a beat, a pause between us where I felt Jack stiffen, start to pull me back.

“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I said, even though my heart was pumping fast now, adrenaline racing through me, causing a shaking in the hand gripping the gun. “Where can I find him?”

He released a little laugh. “You make mistake. No English.”

I had a moment of self-doubt when I felt very, very silly. But no. It was the same voice I’d heard on the phone, the same gruffness, the same thick accent.

“Really?” I said. I pulled Camilla’s phone out of my pocket and found the number on the call log, hit send. The ringing coming from his pants-some indecipherable pop tune-seemed to startle him; he glanced annoyed at his own pocket. Then he pushed past us like a linebacker, snatching the bag from my shoulder, knocking me to the hard concrete and body-checking Jack against the wall. He broke into an impossibly fast sprint into the park. Jack and I exchanged a shocked look. I scrambled to my feet and gave chase.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled after me.

“He’s got the bag!” I called, as if this justified risking my life. And in the moment it seemed to.

I broke away and ran down the concrete trail past the ornate lampposts and benches, but by the time I reached a fork in the trail, he was nowhere to be seen. Jack came up behind me. In his hands were the pieces of Camilla’s cell phone, which I must have dropped when I fell to the ground. The despair that swept over me might have brought me to my knees if my attention wasn’t diverted by two sharp reports cracking the night. Then Jack was on me, pulling me behind a large rock formation off the paved trail. Two more shots rang out, and a car alarm answered, filling the air with its mournful, incessant wail.

We huddled speechless until we saw the stranger stumble into view. He took a few staggering steps and then fell hard onto his belly with a low, terrible moan. Stupidly, I left the cover of the rock and kneeled beside him, touched his shoulder. He was talking, mumbling in a language I recognized but didn’t understand. I leaned in close to him, barely aware of Jack behind me, pulling at my arm. He was saying something like, “Isabel, there’s someone coming. Someone shot this guy; they’re coming after us.”

But I didn’t hear him then, because I was listening to the whispering of a dying man.

“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I asked him. “Where is he? Please.”

There was no reason for me to think he might know the answer to this question. And it was blindly selfish, some might even call it depraved indifference, to make demands of this person who lay bleeding on the cold concrete of Central Park. But every ounce of my drive lived in this question. And this stranger was the only one I had to ask. In all his final mutterings, which ceased in a horrifying gurgle, I only heard one word I thought I understood. Whether it was the answer to my question or not, I wouldn’t know until later.

He said, “Praha.”

Prague.

That magical city with its bloodred rooftops and towering castle, its muscular bone buildings and dark hidden squares. It captured me the first time I walked its cobblestone streets and marveled at its magnificent architecture. How I dreamed of Franz Kafka in the cafés he haunted. How I reveled in the predawn hush, the only quiet moment on Charles Bridge, that cascade of stone with its towering, tortured saints moaning through the ages. How I loved it even more the second time with my husband-to-be. I felt it became mine somehow when I married Marcus, someplace that would become a part of our lives, of the history of the children I hoped to bring into the world. The next time I visited Prague its secrets would try to swallow me, devour me whole. But I didn’t know that yet.

It made sense to me then. He would return home, of course. How long had it been since I’d seen him in Camilla’s apartment? Two, maybe three hours. He could be on a plane already, couldn’t he? There’d be a stop in London, maybe Paris. But then he’d go back to the place that made him.

When I looked up again from the man whose name I never knew, I saw her standing about a hundred feet away-the woman I knew only as S. She wore a strange expression as she stared directly at me. I heard Detective Breslow’s words again. There’s so much rage evidenced here. She hated me. She envied me. I saw it there in the features of her perfect face. Why? Because he’d loved me once? She had it all now, didn’t she? My husband, my money, even my ring?

She looked like any slim New Yorker taking a run in the park too late at night, except that she had Camilla’s bag strapped over her shoulder and across her chest. She wore black leggings, a short white jacket with black racing stripes down the sleeves. Another man-I might have recognized him as one of the faux FBI agents who took apart Marcus’s office, but I couldn’t be sure-was behind her. He was dark and thick-bodied, but he hid in shadows and I couldn’t clearly see the character of his face.

I rose and Jack moved in front of me. He didn’t know who they were; the weapons they must have been carrying weren’t apparent. But he knew their malice instinctively, acted to protect me.

I reached for the gun in my pocket and gripped it hard.

“I have a gun!” I yelled from behind Jack. I sounded pathetic and desperate.

S turned to look at her partner and they both started to laugh, filling me with childish rage. I almost took the gun out and starting firing, so unhinged was I in that moment. But they both broke into a run. As she turned, she lifted her hand in a friendly wave. And then she was gone, the shadows of the trail swallowing them both. I let them go, drained, stunned. I knew when I’d been beaten. I’d made a gamble and lost. We both stood there for I don’t know how long, just staring after them. Then we heard the distant wailing of sirens.

“We should stay and wait for the police,” Jack said sensibly. “Tell them what happened.”

The foolish things we do in the wake of lost love. How angry we are, how desperate when it’s snatched from us, as though we had some right to have and hold it forever. We don’t see love as an organic thing that might fade and die like flowers in a vase. We compare it to minerals and gems, things that last unchanging through time. When love dies we see it as something precious, solid, owned, that was stolen from us. We chase it, beg for its return, revenge its loss, try to steal it back. We don’t imagine that it could fade like vapor, that it was just a moment that has passed as life itself will.

I was in the grip of righteous anger.

“I need my bag and my money,” I told him, holding his dark, fearful gaze.

“Iz.” He turned, put his hands on my shoulders. I put my hands on top of his. The wailing of approaching sirens grew louder.

“Are you my friend?” I asked.

“Iz.”

“Are you?”

“Of course.”

“Then give me your keys. Tell me where the money is, and let me go.”

He shook his head. “Go ahead. I dare you to pull a gun on me, too. I’m not Erik. I’ll make you shoot me.”

I dropped my chin to my chest. “Please, Jack. I can’t let him have so much. I’ll never be able to live with myself. I’ll die.”

I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes. I didn’t want him to see how deep was my rage and my shame, how total my desperation.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Let’s go.”

The disease that Marcus brought into my life had infected everything and everyone connected to me, now Jack included. But he’d always been my coconspirator, the one who understood my mind best, so it was only natural that we should come together now in the writing of this story, the end unknown to both of us. We’d bandied about countless plots, argued over motivation, plausibility, fought about truth in character. Of course, he’d want to help me resolve the fiction of my life with Marcus. I might have convinced him to let me go; I knew he loved me enough to let me do what my heart dictated, no matter what. But the truth is I didn’t want to face alone what lay ahead.

We joined hands and ran.

19

Linda didn’t have an off-switch, not when it came to her children. She and Erik didn’t take a week away, like their friends often did, leaving the kids with Izzy or one of the grandmothers. She just couldn’t imagine it, boarding a vehicle that would loft into the air, separating her by hundreds or even thousands of miles from Trevor and Emily. Margie thought this was very unhealthy, that ultimately it would take a toll on the marriage, that the children would become too dependent, too needy, never self-reliant. And maybe she was right. She and Erik were in crisis. Trevor cried like a toddler when she’d left them earlier with Erik’s mom; Emily sulked. But Linda thought Margie’s off-switch was a bit too well-developed, that she had disconnected too easily and too often from her girls. That sometimes even when she’d been present, she’d been absent. Izzy didn’t share her feelings about this, remembered things differently.

Linda remembered often feeling alone in her family, that she was no one’s first thought. Her shrink thought this caused her to be overly vigilant to Trevor’s and Emily’s needs. It was true that since Emily was born there hadn’t been a morning when she wasn’t immediately upon awaking tending to one of her children. There had been no mornings of languishing in bed with her husband, no really abandoned nights out. Ever. Was this unusual? She didn’t really know. Most of their friends, other artists or professionals, had chosen to have only one child. Most of them had full-time nannies or au pairs, young, live-in girls from Europe who seemed in the best cases like surrogate children (whom you’d never had to diaper and who now did the dishes and cared for the smaller child), and in the worst cases like tight-bodied interlopers gazing with barely concealed avariciousness at their wealth and husbands.

She knew her friends loved their children; she didn’t judge them. But it seemed to her that only she and Erik were parenting full-time, fitting work and life around Trevor and Emily, putting personal wants and needs last or never. Which way was right? Who was better off? She honestly didn’t know. She just knew she couldn’t be another way.

She remembered reading somewhere that the look on your face when a child enters your field of vision is one of the single most important factors in the shaping of that child’s self-esteem. Luckily, she couldn’t keep the delight off her face when she looked at Trevor and Emily; their faces, the sound of their voices, their accomplishments-from walking to potty training, from academic achievement to personal blossoming-filled her with more joy and excitement than anything else she’d known in her life.

But that statement had caused her to think back to her own childhood, to remember faces, expressions. She remembered wandering eyes, hard stares into the distance, furrowed brows. Not directed at her. Just in general, the faces she saw were sad ones-and she had never been enough to brighten them.

She was thinking this as Erik emerged from wherever they’d been holding him, with Margie’s lawyer, John Brace. Actually, he was the son of Brace the elder, Fred’s longtime attorney, who was getting too old, too frail to come out to the police station in the middle of the night. There was something harder, not as gentlemanly, about the younger Brace. A hard-ass. His face was all sharp angles, still and pale. She examined him as he talked to Erik, low, intent. She thought, He’s a wolf. Feral, lonely, merciless. Good, perfect, exactly what they needed now.

They approached her and she embraced her husband, longer, harder than was appropriate with a stranger present. But she couldn’t seem to let go of him. She saw Brace turn discreetly away, give them the privacy of not staring.

“It’s okay,” said Erik softly, rubbing her back. “I’m okay.”

Brace cleared his throat and they turned to look at him. “This is an emotional time for you. But we have a lot of ground to cover. Your financial losses. Your sister, how we get in touch with her and convince her to return to the fold. Your potential culpability in this matter. How we proceed from here to protect ourselves. Where should we do that?”

“It’s late,” said Erik. “Let’s do it tomorrow, John.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. A lot can happen between now and then. We need to be prepared.”

Looking weary, anxious, Erik nodded. “Home,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

“No,” said Linda, too quickly. By the time she’d left the hospital with Trevor and Emily, and shuttled them into a waiting taxi, Ben had left. But she couldn’t count on him not to be lurking around the apartment, waiting to ambush them on their return.

“Let’s go to a café or something. Café Orlin is right around the corner. It’s quiet, private. I’m starved.”

Erik looked as if he was about to argue but then seemed to change his mind.

“Fine,” he said, taking her hand. “That’s fine.”

Brace nodded uncertainly, took a quick glance at his watch. Then he ushered them toward the exit. Linda noticed and liked that he seemed in charge, but was still deferential. She felt safer, calmer with him there, as if there was no problem he couldn’t make disappear. The elder Brace didn’t have this quality, didn’t seem like an enforcer, more like a trusted adviser and friend. Someone who would do his best to help, within the letter of the law, but would bow to forces bigger than himself. His face was soft at the jaw, kind and warm at the eyes. There was no kindness or softness in the face of the younger man, just granite.

The three exited the precinct and turned left, toward First Avenue. As they proceeded down the block, Linda saw-just out of the corner of her eye-Ben, waiting in his Mercedes across the street. Her heart nearly stopped in her chest, her stomach bottomed out completely, but she kept walking, pretended not to see.

She hoped he was a coward, that he’d stay in the periphery, a looming threat that never materialized. But then she heard a car door open and slam hard. She found herself cringing, clinging close to Erik, not able to bring herself to turn around even as she heard the footfalls behind them. John and Erik, already in conversation, seemed not to notice.

“I’m going to need you to start from the beginning, Erik,” John was saying. “How Marcus Raine approached you, what documentation he provided, what you signed. Then we’ll work our way up to the events of this evening.”

“Okay,” Erik said. “I can do that.”

“Can I make a suggestion? It really would be better if we went back to your place. I’m reluctant to discuss your private matters in public. And in lieu of a secretary, I’d like to record our conversation to be transcribed later.”

“I agree. Linda?”

Linda barely heard them. She had the vague sense that she was being asked something that needed answering, but she couldn’t hear over the rushing of blood in her ears. They were just about to turn the corner.

“Linda!” called Ben, loud, insistent. All three of them stopped moving and turned back, startled at the sound of his voice.

Ben stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo. In the dim light of the street, the bulk of his frame was dark, menacing. She could barely see his face. She found herself unable to move, to open her mouth.

Please, Ben, she wanted to say, don’t do this to him. Don’t do this to me. Not now. But she couldn’t; it all lodged in her throat. Her life was a china teacup, already on its way from delicate grip to marble floor. She had no one to blame but herself. She thought of her babies, Emily and Trevor, how she’d betrayed them more than she had anyone else with her vanity and stupidity. What kind of mother was she if she could lead herself and the father of her children into a moment like this?

“Who is that?” asked Erik, his face open and earnest, even in such a moment.

Linda shook her head. She opened her mouth but still no words came.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am!” Ben roared, moving closer.

Erik pulled Linda back, and John Brace was quick to move in front of them, hold up a hand.

“Stay back, man. What do you want?”

John Brace suddenly seemed even tougher, harder, with his shaved head and broad shoulders, deep authoritative voice. The briefcase he clutched in his hand didn’t diminish this image; he looked as though he was prepared to use it as a weapon or a shield.

“She doesn’t love you, Erik,” Ben said, his voice cracking like an adolescent boy’s. “She loves me.”

Linda could see his whole body was quaking. She realized suddenly, clearly, that something was clinically wrong with him. He wasn’t just desperate or upset, or lovesick. She had a cold dawning, a terrible fear for his family, those two sweet-faced girls, his pretty wife. When he moved a step closer, into the orange glow of a street lamp, he seemed deranged, eyes wild, jaw clenching and unclenching, big chest heaving.

John spread his arms out and started herding them backward. He said quietly, “He has a gun.”

Then Linda saw it, too. She’d been so focused on his face, how totally unself-conscious he was, how lost in his own mind, she hadn’t noticed. Then he started lifting his arm.

She broke from Erik, started running toward Ben. She felt Erik, then John’s hands on her, holding her back. Heard them both yelling, following close behind as she shifted away from them. She came to stop in front of Ben, feeling small and insubstantial before him. His height and breadth, the size of his anger dwarfed her. She wanted to scream at him. Instead she put her hand on his chest and whispered, “Ben, we have children. Think about what you’re doing to your girls right now. Please.”

He seemed to hear, to shrink at her words. Anger left him, dropped the features of his face into a sagging sadness, left his shoulders to slump forward.

Then Erik was pulling her back and there was shouting all around them. Uniformed officers seemed to have poured out of everywhere, there were so many emerging from the doors of the precinct building and coming out of cars. A shift change.

Then so many different voices echoing on the concrete of the buildings around them. Freeze! Drop that weapon! Drop it! Drop it! Drop it! Coming from everywhere like the call of crows.

Erik and John pulled Linda back and she was screaming, No, no, no! Because she knew. She saw it in Ben’s eyes and watched as it spread across his face, that smile, that “Fuck you, world” smile. She’d seen it before, it was etched in her spirit, had dictated in so many ways the course of her life. She’d looked for it in every face, beneath the flimsy veils they all wore. She’d finally found it in Ben. No, no, no! She saw him raise the gun beneath his chin and, without hesitating, pull the trigger. And then in a horrible explosion of light and sound, a dreadful spray of red, it all disappeared.

20

A suicide, a miscarriage, a sudden disappearance. All abbreviations, interruptions. Variations on a theme that has run through my life.

The tickets were easily purchased with Jack’s credit card, and even though as we waited to board the plane I saw my picture flash briefly on one of the televisions mounted up high, no one even glanced in my direction. The sound was down for some reason. The text on the screen read: Real-Life Mystery: The Downtown Murder of Three People Linked to Missing Husband of Bestselling Author. The story was obviously small news at this point. It wasn’t even on the screen for thirty seconds.

I was five years younger in that photo and maybe ten pounds heavier when it was taken, but I might still have been recognizable if I hadn’t tied back my hair into a bun at the base of my neck, tucked it beneath a gray knit cap pulled down over the bandage on my head, and donned a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses that I needed but never wore.

But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was the simple fact, as Marcus always claimed, that people weren’t looking anymore. They’ve got their earbuds in. They’re staring at tiny screens that fit in a palm. They’re talking on the phone, eyes blank, unseeing.

Even though I knew I wasn’t officially a suspect, I kept waiting for the police to arrive. Maybe my name was on some kind of a watch list of people not allowed to leave the country? I’d expected to be stopped at check-in, at security. But no, we’d glided through security checks, while a young mother was forced to empty her bags, carry a weeping toddler through one of those machines that blows air on you in sharp, quick blasts. Her little boy screamed in fright. I thought of my sister, the kids, as we walked past them.

ANOTHER THEME THAT runs though my life: airplanes. After my father’s death, I spent long hours lying in the grass behind my house, staring up at the sky. I was obsessed with the idea of direction, the Catholic concept of heaven being up and hell being down. I knew suicide was a sin, punishable by eternal damnation. I tried to imagine endless suffering for my father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him punished for being too afraid, too weak, and too sad to go on. It didn’t seem right-nor did the idea of his lofting up to some cloud to the sound of harp music work for me. It all seemed a bit silly, a bit earthly even to my young mind, a man-made idea, a desperate attempt to explain the unknowable.

I started noticing airplanes then. Their white, silent flight filled me with a terrible longing. I imagined the fuselage filled with passengers en route to some fabulous destination. Their lives were their own, free from tragedy and sadness. The kind of grief that held me in its grip was impossible for them. The desire to be high and far away from my life, to be someone else, anywhere else, was a physical pain, a hole in my center.

No matter where you go, there you are. Fred, of course; one of his wisdom one-liners. He’d come to join me, sat down in the wet grass beside me. I’d pointed up at the plane, told him I wished I were there. “That’s the thing you can never escape, try as you might,” he said. “Try as you might. Pick your poison-drugs, alcohol. You always wake up with yourself eventually.”

“Not him. Not my father.”

Fred went still, looked at me carefully. “Suicide is not an escape. It’s an end.”

“How do you know?”

He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then: “I suppose I don’t really know. But I can only imagine that an action that destroys life and hope, which leaves only anger and sadness in its wake, can’t be the right course.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have the words to say that I thought his idea was incomplete, unsatisfying. That maybe it was the only course open when you finally realize you can’t escape yourself and you can’t live with yourself. Maybe an end is an escape.

“Want some ice cream?” he asked me then.

“Okay.”

MAYBE IT WAS a longing like this that drove my husband. That sickening, ardent desire to be anyone, anywhere else. Maybe he chose the alternative of stepping into someone else’s skin, someone else’s name, someone else’s life. Less final than suicide, maybe even an act of hope that someplace else is better than here.

A FEW HOURS earlier we returned to Jack’s apartment and retrieved an envelope of cash from beneath his mattress. The next steps weren’t as clear to him as they were to me.

“You don’t even know that was an answer to your question. He was a dying man. He might not have even heard you.”

The truth was, it wasn’t just that. In fact, when he said the word-Praha-it made a deep kind of sense to me, as though I’d known it all along. Jack wouldn’t buy that. After all, who was going to trust my instincts at the moment? I had to convince him.

“Marcus is not going to stay in the U.S. He can’t. He has run his con and now he’s going back where he came from.”

“You don’t know that. I thought you said he hated the Czech Republic, that he never wanted to go home.”

“It’s the only course open to him now.”

“You don’t know that,” he repeated.

“He can disappear. Take back his name, Kristof Ragan, and just leave. At this point, they don’t even know his real identity. He’ll be swallowed. They’ll never find him. What’s the extradition policy between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?”

Jack looked at me blankly. “How should I know?”

The other truth was that I didn’t have any ideas about where else he could be. Was it a desperate act to board a plane to Prague in search of my husband? Yes. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Out of sheer exhaustion, not a lack of anxiety or urgency, I lay on the plush down of Jack’s bed as he threw things into a large duffel bag-jeans, underwear, some old clothes of mine from a night I’d spent here after a party, a pair of sneakers I’d left after the last time we ran in Central Park together. When I closed my eyes I saw the dying stranger in Central Park. I saw my ruined home. Jack left the room for a minute and came back with a shaving kit.

“I packed you a toothbrush.”

“We’re not going on vacation.”

“You can’t travel overseas without luggage. It looks suspicious.”

Jack was ever the pragmatist; I always feared his reading of my novels. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “How did she get from here to there?” Or: “How did he find her in that huge crowd?” Or: “What’s her motivation for doing what she did? It doesn’t make sense.”

He liked the linear progression, the logical course of events, motivations so obvious that they didn’t brook questions. I liked the illogical leap in time and tense. Meaning that the nuts and bolts-how the window got unlocked or what vehicle was used to transport my character from this scene to that-bored and annoyed me.

It’s the essence, the energy of character and action that moves me. I don’t want to tell how the vase found its way to the ground. Was it dropped? Was it thrown? I just want to show the shards, glistening and sharp, on the marble floor. Because that’s life. We don’t always act out of logic. Things can’t always be explained. Sometimes we don’t know how the vase got there, just that it has shattered, irreparably.

“Let me ask you something,” Jack said. He zipped up the duffel and moved it over toward the door. Then he returned to sit at the foot of the bed. “What’s this about?”

“We’ve already had this conversation. You know what it’s about.”

“Is it justice you’re looking for? Or revenge? When and if you find him, how exactly do you plan to dole that out?”

I didn’t answer, just stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t looking for an answer. This was his way. Just put it in your pipe and smoke it, he’d say.

“Or is it just about the why and how, Isabel? Is it just about the knowing, the understanding that you need?”

I still didn’t feel compelled to answer.

“Because I’m your friend. I’m with you. I’ll buy the tickets. I’ll get on a plane and go with you wherever you need to go. But let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.”

“What makes a right reason?” I asked.

“Something that, when bad things happen and it all goes to shit, is still worth all the trouble. Something that means enough to risk everything you’re risking right now.”

I looked at his profile, the crooked ridge of his nose. He seemed tired to me suddenly. I looked around the room and noticed that it was another minimal space, like his office. Just the low platform bed, covered in expensive linens. The walls were white, the floor hardwood. Where was all his stuff? His magazines and dirty clothes, his photographs and unpaid bills? I remembered his dorm room from NYU-a pigsty of staggering proportions. When did he become so neat, so anti-clutter?

“My father didn’t leave a note,” I said. We’d never really talked about this element of my life, though of course he knew. And it had come up again and again in my fiction. He was a careful reader. He probably knew my issues relating to my father’s death better than anyone, including myself. For Jack, I was an open book.

“Okay, Isabel,” he said softly. “I get it.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“I know that.”

He moved over to the door and, with effort, I lifted myself off his bed.

“You have to do one thing before we go. Nonnegotiable,” he said. “Two things, actually.”

“What?”

“One: Call your sister. And two: Write down everything you didn’t tell that detective and e-mail it to him. Let him know you’re on his side. It might work in your favor. It might even help you get what you want-answers.”

I thought about arguing, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was unmovable on these matters. Also, a small part of me still recognized a good idea when I heard one. I did what he asked. I left a message for my sister, surprised to get her voice mail. And I wrote a long note to Detective Crowe, telling him everything I had learned, including my husband’s real name and mentioning the e-mail I’d had from Camilla. Then, whether it was the right action or not, for the right reasons or not, Jack and I left for the airport.

IN MY SEAT I fidgeted and squirmed, unable to relax or get comfortable. The hours stretching ahead of me seemed endless, a river I would never cross. I kept waiting for the pretty flight attendant to look at me with a frown, then go and pick up a phone somewhere and make the call. Maybe on some level I wanted this to happen. But she only smiled and brought me a glass of champagne that I downed in two swallows.

“Easy,” said Jack. “That head injury has you loopy enough.”

I lifted my glass and the attendant was quick to refill and I was quick to drain that as well. Jack didn’t bother with any more warnings; he just leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

All I had was my husband’s given name, the name of a town outside of Prague, and the vaguest idea that it was to that place Marcus might return. I thought of the last kiss we shared, the horrible scream I heard, the woman S preening on the Web site. I thought of the dying man and his last whispers. But even with all of this swimming in the dark waters of my mind, the two glasses of champagne helped me to drift into a troubled sleep. I dreamed of my father.