Die For You

1

The last time I saw my husband, he had a tiny teardrop of raspberry jam in the blond hairs of his goatee. We’d just shared cappuccinos he’d made in the ridiculously expensive machine I’d bought on a whim three weeks earlier, and croissants he’d picked up on his way in from his five-mile run, the irony lost on him. His lean, hard body was a machine, never gaining weight without his express design. Unlike me. The very aroma of baked goods and my thighs start to expand.

They were warm, the croissants. And as I tried to resist, he sliced them open and slathered them with butter, then jam on top of that, left one eviscerated and gooey, waiting on the white plate. I fought the internal battle and lost, finally reaching for it. It was perfect-flaky, melty, salty, sweet. And then-gone.

“You’re not a very good influence,” I said, licking butter from my fingertips. “It would take over an hour on the elliptical trainer to burn that off. And we both know that’s not going to happen.” He turned his blue eyes on me, all apology.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Then the smile. Oh, the smile. It demanded a smile in return, no matter how angry, how frustrated, how fed up I was. “But it was so good, wasn’t it? You’ll remember it all day.” Was he talking about the croissant or our predawn lovemaking?

“Yes,” I said as he kissed me, a strong arm snaking around the small of my back pulling me in urgently, an invitation really, not the goodbye that it was. “I will.”

That’s when I saw the bit of jam. I motioned that he should wipe his face. He was dressed for an important meeting. Crucial was the word he used when he told me about it. He peered at his reflection in the glass door of the microwave and wiped the jam away.

“Thanks,” he said, moving toward the door. He picked up his leather laptop case and draped it over his shoulder. It looked heavy; I was afraid he’d wrinkle his suit, a sharp, expensive black wool affair he’d bought recently, but I didn’t say so. Too mothering.

“Thanks for what?” I asked. Already I’d forgotten that I’d spared him from the minor embarrassment of going to an important meeting with food on his face.

“For being the most beautiful thing I’ll see all day.” He was an opportunistic charmer. Had always been that.

I laughed, wrapped my arms around his neck, kissed him again. He knew what to say, knew how to make me feel good. I would think about our lovemaking, that croissant, his smile, that one sentence all day.

“Go get ’em,” I said as I saw him out of the apartment door, watched him walk to the elevator at the end of the short hallway. He pressed the button and waited. The hallway had sold us on the apartment before we’d even walked through the door: the thick red carpet, the wainscoting, and the ten-foot ceilings-New York City prewar elegance. The elevator doors slid open. Maybe it was then, just before he started to move away, that I saw a shadow cross his face. Or maybe later I just imagined it, to give some meaning to those moments. But if it was there at all, that flicker of what-Sadness? Fear?-it passed over him quickly; was gone so fast it barely even registered with me then.

“You know I will,” he said with the usual cool confidence. But I heard it, the lick of his native accent on his words, something that only surfaced when he was stressed or drunk. But I wasn’t worried for him. I never doubted him. Whatever he had to pull off that day, something vague about investors for his company, there was no doubt in my mind that he’d do it. That was just him: What he wanted, he got. With a wave and a cheeky backward glance, he stepped into the elevator and the doors closed on him. And then-gone.

“I love you, Izzy!” I thought I heard him yell, clowning around, as the elevator dropped down the shaft, taking him and his voice away.

I smiled. After five years of marriage, a miscarriage, at least five knock-’em-down, drag-’em-outs that lasted into the wee hours of the morning, hot sex, dull sex, good days, hard days, all the little heartbreaks and disappointments (and not-so-little ones) inevitable in a relationship that doesn’t crash and burn right away, after some dark moments when I thought we weren’t going to make it, that I’d be better off without him, and all the breathless moments when I was sure I couldn’t even survive without him-after all of that he didn’t have to say it, but I was glad he still did.

I closed the door and the morning was under way. Within five minutes, I was chatting on the phone with Jack Mannes, my old friend and longtime agent.

“Any sign of that check?” The author’s eternal question.

“I’ll follow up.” The agent’s eternal reply. “How’s the manuscript going?”

“It’s… going.”

Within twenty minutes, I was headed out for a run, the taste of Marc’s buttery, raspberry-jam kiss still on my lips.

WHEN HE STEPPED onto the street, he was blasted by a cold, bitter wind that made him wish he’d worn a coat. He thought about turning around but it was too late for that. Instead he buttoned his suit jacket, slung the strap of his laptop bag across his chest, and dug his hands deep into his pockets. He moved fast on West Eighty-sixth Street toward Broadway. At the corner, he jogged down the yellow-tiled stairway into the subway station, was glad for the warmth of it even with the particularly pungent stench of urine that morning. He swiped his card and passed through the turnstile, waited for the downtown train.

It was past nine, so the crowd on the platform was thinner than it would have been an hour before. A young businessman kept alternately leaning over the tracks, trying to catch sight of the oncoming train lights, and glancing at his watch. In spite of the rich drape of his black wool coat, his expensive shoes, he looked harried, disheveled. Marcus Raine felt a wash of disdain for him, for his obvious tardiness, and for his even more obvious distress, though he couldn’t have explained why.

Marcus leaned his back against the far wall, hands still in his pockets, and waited. It was the perpetual condition of the New Yorker to wait-for trains, buses, or taxis, in impossibly long lines for a cup of coffee, in crowds to see a film or visit a particular museum exhibit. The rest of the world saw New Yorkers as rude, impatient. But they had been conditioned to queue one behind the other with the resignation of the damned, perhaps moaning in discontent, but waiting nonetheless.

He’d been living in this city since he was eighteen years old, but he never quite saw himself as a New Yorker. He saw himself more as a spectator at a zoo, one who’d been allowed to wander around inside the cage of the beast. But then he’d always felt that way, even as a child, even in his native home. Always apart, watching. He accepted this as the natural condition of his life, without a trace of unhappiness about it or any self-pity. Isabel had always understood this about him; as a writer, she was in a similar position. You can’t really observe, unless you stand apart.

It was one of the things that first drew him to her, this sentence. He’d read a novel she’d written, found it uncommonly deep and involving. Her picture on the back of the jacket intrigued him and he’d searched her out on the Internet, read some things about her that interested him-that she was the child of privilege but successful in her own right as the author of eight bestselling novels, that she’d traveled the world and written remarkably insightful essays about the places she visited. “Prague is a city of secrets,” she’d written. “Fairy-tale rues taper off into dark alleys, a secret square hides behind a heavy oak and iron door, ornate facades shelter dark histories. Her face is exquisite, finely wrought and so lovely, but her eyes are cool. She’ll smirk but never laugh. She knows, but she won’t tell.” This was true in a way that no outsider could ever really understand, but this American writer caught a glimpse of the real city and it moved him.

It was the river of ink-black curls, those dark eyes, jet in a landscape of snowy skin, the turn of her neck, the birdlike delicacy of her hands, that caused him to seek her out at one of her book signings. He knew right away that she was the one, as Americans were so fond of saying-as if their whole lives were nothing but the search to make themselves whole by finding another. He meant it in another way entirely, at first.

It seemed like such a long time ago, that initial thrill, that rush of desire. He often wished he could go back to the night they first met, relive their years together. He’d done so many wrong things-some she knew about, some she did not, could never, know. He remembered that there was something in her gaze when she first loved him that filled an empty place inside him. Even with all the things she didn’t understand, she didn’t look at him like that anymore. Her gaze seemed to drift past him. Even when she held his eyes, he believed she was seeing someone who wasn’t there. And maybe that was his fault.

He heard the rumble of the train approaching, and pushed himself off the wall. He’d started moving toward the edge when he felt a hand on his arm. It was a firm, hard grip and Marcus, on instinct, rolled his arm and broke the grasp, bringing his fist up fast and taking a step back.

“Take it easy, Marcus,” the other man said with a throaty laugh. “Relax.” He lifted two beefy hands and pressed the air between them. “Why so tense?”

“Ivan,” Marcus said coolly, though his heart was an adrenaline-fueled hammer. The moment took on an unreal cast, the tenor of a dark fantasy. Ivan was a ghost, someone so deeply buried in Marcus’s memory that he might as well have been looking at a resurrected corpse. Once a tall, wiry young man, manic and strange, Ivan had gained a lot of weight. Not fat but muscle; he looked like a bulldozer, squat and powerful, ready to break concrete and the earth itself.

“What?” That deep laugh again, with less amusement in its tone. “No ‘How are you’? No ‘So good to see you’?”

Marcus watched Ivan’s face. The wide smile beneath cheekbones like cliffs, the glittering dark eyes-they could all freeze like ice. Even jovial like this, there was something vacant about Ivan, something unsettling. It was so odd to see him in this context, in this life, that for a moment Marcus could almost believe that he was dreaming, that he was still in bed beside Isabel. That he’d wake from this as he had from any of the nightmares that plagued him.

Marcus still didn’t say anything as his train came and went, leaving them alone on the platform. The woman in the fare booth read a paperback novel. Marcus could hear the rush of trains below, hear the hum and horns of the street above. Too much time passed. In the silence between them, Marcus watched Ivan’s expression cool and harden.

Then Marcus let go of a loud laugh that echoed off the concrete and caused the clerk to look up briefly before she went back to her book.

“Ivan!” Marcus said, forcing a smile. “Why so tense?”

Ivan laughed uncertainly, then reached out and punched Marcus on the arm. Marcus pulled Ivan into an enthusiastic embrace and they patted each other vigorously on the back.

“Do you have some time for me?” Ivan asked, dropping an arm over Marcus’s shoulder and moving him toward the exit. Ivan’s gigantic arm felt like a side of beef, its weight impossible to move without machinery. Marcus pretended not to hear the threat behind the question.

“Of course, Ivan,” Marcus said. “Of course I do.”

Marcus heard a catch in his own voice, which he tried to cover with a cough. If Ivan noticed, he didn’t let on. A current of foreboding cut a valley from his throat into his belly as they walked up the stairs, Ivan still holding on tight. He was talking, telling a joke about a hooker and a priest, but Marcus wasn’t listening. He was thinking about Isabel. He was thinking about how she looked this morning, a little sleepy, pretty in her pajamas, her hair a cloud of untamed curls, smelling like honeysuckle and sex, tasting like butter and jam.

On the street, Ivan was laughing uproariously at his own joke and Marcus found himself laughing along, though he had no idea what the punch line had been. Ivan knew a lot of jokes, one more inane than the last. He’d learned a good deal of his English this way, reading joke books and watching stand-up comedians, insisted that one could not really understand a language without understanding its humor, without knowing what native speakers considered funny. Marcus wasn’t sure this was true. But there was no arguing with Ivan. It wasn’t healthy. The smallest things caused a switch to flip in the big man. He’d be laughing one minute and then the next he’d be beating you with those fists the size of hams. This had been true since they were children together, a lifetime ago.

Ivan approached a late-model Lincoln parked illegally on Eighty-sixth. With the remote in his hand he unlocked it, then reached to open the front passenger door. It was an expensive vehicle, one that Ivan would not have been able to afford given his circumstances of the last few years. Marcus knew what this meant, that he’d returned to the life that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

Marcus could see the front entrance to his building, gleaming glass and polished wood, a wide circular drive. A large holiday wreath hung on the awning, reminding him that Christmas was right around the corner.

He watched as a young mother who lived there-was her name Janie?-left with her two small children. He found himself thinking suddenly, urgently, of the baby Isabel had wanted. He’d never wanted children, had been angry when Isabel got pregnant, even relieved when she miscarried. Somehow the sight of this woman with her little girls caused a sharp stab of regret. Marcus turned his face so that they wouldn’t see him as they passed on the other side of the street.

“You’ve been living well,” Ivan said, his eyes, too, on the building entrance. In the bright morning light, Marcus could see the blue smudges under Ivan’s eyes, a deep scar on the side of his face that Marcus didn’t remember. Ivan’s clothes were cheap, dirty; his nails bitten to the quick. He didn’t look well, had the look of someone without the money or the inclination to take care of himself, someone who’d spent too many years indoors. Ivan still wore a smile, but all the warmth was gone. It was stone cold.

“And you? Are you well?” Marcus asked, feeling a tightness in his chest.

Ivan gave a slow shrug, offered his palms. “Not as well.”

Marcus let a beat pass. “What do you want, Ivan?”

“You didn’t think you’d see me again.”

“It has been a long time.”

“Yes, Marcus,” he said, leaning on the name with heavy sarcasm. “It has been.”

Marcus felt himself moving toward the car; there was really no way around it. As he put his hand on the door, Marcus saw his wife leave the building, her hair back-the chaos of it barely tamed with a thin band-her workout clothes on, an old beat-up blue sweatshirt, well-worn sneakers. He thought of the breakfast they’d shared, how she’d worried about the calories. He ducked into the car and watched her pause, look about her. She had that steely expression on her face, the one she got when she was forcing herself to do something she didn’t want to do. He could see it, even from a distance. Then she turned, quickly, suddenly, and ran away. Everything in him wanted to race after her but Ivan climbed into the driver’s seat. The car bucked with the other man’s weight, filled with his scent-cigarettes and body odor.

“Don’t worry,” Ivan said, issuing a throaty laugh. “I only want to talk. To come to a new arrangement.”

“Do I look worried, Ivan?” Marcus said with a cool smile. Ivan didn’t answer.

As they pulled into traffic, a line from the The Prophet came back to Marcus: “It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.” Marcus could feel the life he’d been living shifting, fading. With every city block they passed, he left a gauzy sliver of himself behind. The strand that connected him to Isabel, he felt it pull taut and then snap. It caused him a pointed and intense physical pain in the center of his chest. But he took comfort in a strange thought: The man she would grieve and come to hate, the one she would not be able to forgive, had never existed in the first place.

2

“Rick,” I said, fifteen hours after Marcus left for the day. It was going on ten P.M. Lasagna sagged in a glass baking dish, untouched on the counter. A salad wilted in the fridge. “It’s Isabel.”

“Hey, Iz!” he said brightly. I picked up on a strain to his voice, though, as if he was trying hard at that brightness. “What’s up?”

“You guys working late tonight?” I struggled to keep my voice light, my tone easy. I had the television on, the volume too low to even hear. CNN news bites flashed quick fire on the screen-there was an insurgent bombing in Iraq, a celebrity had shaved her head and checked into rehab, a police officer in Chicago was shot. I could hear the water running though the pipes in our wall; our neighbor was taking a shower.

The hesitation on the other end caused my stomach to flip.

“Yeah,” he said too late, drawing the word out, mock-forlorn. “You know how we do around here. No mercy.” He gave a little laugh-a fake one, uncomfortable. He’d slipped immediately into cover mode.

“Can I talk to my husband?” I heard the edge creeping into my tone; I wondered if he did, too.

“Sure,” he said. “Hold on a second.” A flutter of relief then, my worry dissipating. He’s working late, forgot to call. Nothing he hasn’t done before. You’re being paranoid. I waited.

“Iz,” said Rick, back on the line. “I think he ran out to grab a bite. I’ll tell him you called?”

“His cell is going straight to voice mail,” I said, apropos of nothing.

“I think he said the battery was dead,” he answered softly.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” You liar.

I hung up. He’d put me on hold and tried Marc on his cell phone, didn’t get him, came back and lied to me. It wasn’t even just a suspicion; I knew it was true. I’d seen them cover for each other like that with clients; I knew Rick, my husband’s business partner, had done it to me before for various reasons, some worse than others. I’d always found their dynamic a bit strange; they weren’t friends. In fact, I sensed an antipathy between them, even though they worked well together. And one never failed to lie or cover for the other.

I poured myself another glass of wine, my second from the cheap bottle of Chardonnay we had in the fridge. As much as I loved my husband, nights like this reminded me about the hairline fissures in our marriage, the ones that creaked and groaned when pressure was applied, threatening to break us apart.

BY MIDNIGHT I was mildly drunk, zoning out on the television set, barely paying attention to what was on the screen. I was listening for the elevator, for the key in the door, for the ringing of the phone. My cell phone was warm in my hand; I’d been holding it for hours, pointlessly trying his number every few minutes. He’d been late before, MIA for half a day, but never like this, never without calling. He might ring drunk from a bar after a fight we’d had, or with some vague lie about work. But this was not like him. It was too… conspicuous. I took to watching the digital clock on the cable box.

12:22.

12:23.

12:24.

Where is he?

ONCE, NOT QUITE two years ago, Marc had been unfaithful with a woman he’d met while away on business in Philadelphia. The relationship lasted for two months, or so he told me later-long phone calls, a couple of last-minute trips out of town. Once she came here to New York while I was away at a writers’ conference-though he swore she never set foot in our apartment. Not a love affair, exactly, but not a one-night stand, either.

I suspected something right away-on the first night he made love to me after returning home from Philadelphia after they’d met. It’s the details that give people away, the things that writers notice that other people might miss. I don’t mean the mundane things like lipstick on a collar, or the scent of sex. I’m talking about essence, the gossamer strands that connect us.

There was something absent about him, an emptiness to his gaze, that told me his thoughts were elsewhere. Our bodies didn’t seem to fit together right. His kiss tasted different. I couldn’t climax, couldn’t cross the distance between us. This had never happened before; even our bad sex was good. We’d managed to make love well even when we were furious with each other, bone tired, or sick with the flu. We’d always been able to connect physically no matter what else was going on.

I wasn’t as upset as one might imagine. There were no histrionics, no thrown dishes, or screaming assaults. I just waited for something tangible to prove or disprove my suspicions while the distance between us grew. I didn’t blame myself, worry about what was wrong with me, where we had failed. It wasn’t like that-I wasn’t like that. He’d met someone, they hit if off and had sex. The sex was good and he wanted more. I knew this on an instinctive level. I knew him, how he admired beauty, how powerful were his appetites. She must have been something, though, for him to stray-that was less like him. I’d met people, too, over the years. I’d been tempted. In a way, I even understood. But it wasn’t in my nature to be unfaithful or dishonest; I couldn’t even lie about how much my Manolo Blahniks had cost. But this is barely even a shoe! It’s like a tongue depressor with some dental floss tied around it. You couldn’t walk a city block in these, Isabel.

The tangible proof turned out to be a text message on his cellular phone. He was in the shower; it was next to me on the bedside table. It was unusual for him to leave the phone out. Usually it was on his person, or tucked in his laptop case. I heard the buzz indicating that a message had been received. I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the phone and opening the message.

A note from someone identified only as “S” read, I can’t stop thinking about you. I can still feel you inside me.

Marcus emerged from the bathroom, a plume of steam following him into the bedroom carrying the scent of a sage-mint body wash we’d been using. I turned to face him. He saw the phone in my hand and, I suppose, the look on my face. We both froze, locked eyes. He seemed strange and unfamiliar to me, as though I was seeing him for the first time emerging half naked from our bathroom. There was an odd tightness from my throat into the muscles of my chest. The air around us was electric with tension.

“Are you in love with her?” I asked finally. I was surprised by the flat, unemotional quality to my tone. I suppose it was the last safe question, its answer determining everything else that followed.

“No,” he said with a quick dismissive shake of his head. “Of course not.”

“Then end it.”

A pressing forward of the shoulders; a slight nod as if he was agreeing to meet me at a café somewhere. “Okay,” he said easily.

“And go sleep somewhere else tonight. I don’t want to be near you right now.”

“Isabel,” he said.

“I mean it,” I said. “Go.”

I was injured-my pride bruised, my heart cracked, if not broken. But mainly I was just disappointed. It was not that I had any illusions about him, about our marriage-hell, about marriage in general. I just thought he had more self-control; I thought he was a stronger man. To think of him lying, sneaking out of town, sleeping with a woman in a hotel somewhere-it cheapened him somehow, made him seem less to me.

We spent a few days apart, had some long phone conversations during which we agreed that there were problems in our marriage that needed to be addressed. There were tears, apologies made and accepted on both sides. He came home. We moved on. I don’t know that I got over it, exactly. But the incident was slowly stitched into the fabric of our relationship; from that point on everything was a slightly different color, a different texture. Not necessarily bad, but not the same. We didn’t seek therapy or hash over details or talk late into the night about why or when or could it happen again.

Those problems that we agreed existed-his workaholic nature, and mine, for that matter, his unavailability, my various neuroses and insecurities-were never actually addressed. I didn’t struggle with newfound trust issues. I saw the incident as an aberration. And neither one of us ever brought any of it up again. At the time, I just thought we were being so intellectual, so sophisticated about it. But was it just denial? I never told anyone about it, not Linda, not Jack. I don’t know. Maybe it was more like fear-induced laziness. You notice the lump under your arm but you can’t bring yourself to have it examined, feel unable to face the diagnosis. You don’t want anyone else to know; their concern would just make it real.

BY THREE A.M. I was thinking of his affair, wondering about her, about all the things I hadn’t wanted to know at the time-her name, what she looked like, her dress size, what she did for a living. Redhead, brunette, blonde? Stylish? Smart? I was wondering: Is he with her now? Or someone else? Has he left me?

Funny that I never imagined he’d been in an accident-pushed onto the subway tracks by a deranged homeless person, hit by a city bus, suffered a head injury from the crumbling facade of a postwar building, all those New York City-type accidents you hear about now and then. It just didn’t seem possible that something like that could befall him. He was too, I don’t know, on his game. He was a man in control of his world. He didn’t believe in accidents.

By five A.M. I had run the gauntlet of emotions-starting with mild worry, moving through cold panic to rage. There was a brief period of nonchalance, then a return to fear, then on to hatred, through despondency ending with desperation. I was about to call my sister when the cell phone, still clutched in my hand, started to ring. The screen blinked blue: Marc calling.

“God, Marc. Where are you?” I answered, so angry, so relieved, so dying to hear that voice offering me a reason for this, something I could buy: Come get me at the hospital, Isabel. I was mugged, hit over the head, just regained consciousness. Don’t cry. I’m okay.

But there was only a crackling on the line, the faint, distant moaning of some kind of horn or siren. Then voices, muffled, both male, tones angry, volume rising and falling, words impossible to understand.

“Marc!” I yelled.

Then there was screaming, a terrible keening. A horrible, primal wail that connected with every nerve ending in my body, causing me to cry out. “Marc! Marcus!”

But the screaming just went on, rocketing through my nervous system, until the line went suddenly dead.

3

What makes a great marriage? The kind you see on the diamond commercials-the shadowy walks and the glistening eyes, the held hands, the passionate kiss beneath stars, the surprise candlelight dinner. Does that even exist? Aren’t those just moments, studded in the landscape of a life where you floss your teeth together, fight about money, burn the risotto, watch too much television? Did I have a great marriage or even a good one? I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. I loved him, couldn’t imagine my life without him, showed him all the places inside me. In spite of all our individual flaws and the mistakes we made in our lives and in our marriage, we’d come together and stayed together for a while.

But those last moments in the kitchen when we’d shared croissants and kisses, when if there’d been more time we’d probably have wound up back in bed, making love again-they were just moments. If you’d tuned in on another day, you might have found us bickering over who was supposed to do the grocery shopping, or ignoring each other, him reading the paper, me staring out the window thinking about my current novel. You might find me crying over my miscarriage and how I hadn’t been able to conceive since, him withdrawing, arms crossed. We’d been ambivalent about children in the first place. My pregnancy was an accident. You might hear him say so, as if that should make me feel the loss less profoundly. Each moment just a sliver of who we were; only he had the full picture.

BY NINE A.M. I was standing on the street outside Marc’s office building. His software company leased the top floor of a small brownstone on Greenwich Avenue. There were other offices at that address, too-a lawyer, a literary agent, a mystery bookshop that occupied the storefront on the basement level. I’d tried the key I had to the street door but it didn’t work. I remembered then, the break-in a month ago-someone used a key to get in and steal nearly a hundred thousand dollars in computer equipment. The locks had been changed after that, a new alarm system installed.

So I waited. I huddled near the stoop, trying to keep out of the brutal, cold wind. Across the street, the shops-a trendy boutique, a pharmacy, a sex shop-all had windows decorated in red and silver for the holidays. I watched people hustling along in their busy lives, coffee in one hand, cell in the other, big bags slung across their chests. They were thinking about work, about getting their shopping done, whether or not it was too late to send cards. Yesterday that was me-hustling, always one step ahead of myself, not present in the least. Twenty-four hours later I felt as though I’d been in a life wreck; my life was a crumbled mass of metal and I’d been hurled through the windshield. All the initial panic I’d felt when Marcus didn’t come home, the shock and dread that gripped me after the horrifying phone call, had drained. At this point, I was stunned, bleeding out by the side of the road.

After the phone call, I’d dialed 911 for lack of any other action to take in my terror. The woman who answered told me a missing adult wasn’t an emergency unless there was evidence of foul play or a history of mental illness. I told her about the screams, everything I’d heard. She said that maybe it was a television or something else-some kind of joke or prank; husbands did cruel things all the time. She told me the police couldn’t even accept a missing-person report without evidence, a history, especially for someone over eighteen, especially for a man. The phone call didn’t count as proof that something was wrong.

“Physical evidence, ma’am.”

“Like what?”

“Like blood, or a sign of forced entry into the residence, a ransom demand-things like that.”

She gave me a phone number to call, and an address where I could report in person, bringing photographs and dental records. Dental records.

“Most people just turn up within seventy-two hours.”

“Most?”

“More than sixty-five percent.”

“And the rest?”

“Accidents. More rarely, murders. And sometimes people just want to disappear.”

Something about the tone of her voice made me feel foolish, ashamed. Like I was one of a hundred women she’d talked to that night whose husbands just hadn’t come home. Honey, he left you, she wanted to say. Wake up.

The natural thing for me to do then would have been to call my sister and her husband, Erik, to tell them what was happening, to get their support. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda; I’d have to tell her about the affair then, wouldn’t I, to give them the full picture? I couldn’t face it. For all the same reasons, and a few others, I didn’t call Jack, either. His antipathy toward Marcus was unexpressed but palpable just the same.

Jack and I had a complicated history. And beyond that, if Marc later learned that I’d called Jack in a moment of crisis, it would confirm all Marc’s past accusations about our friendship. Marcus disliked our closeness, how often we spoke, claimed it was a shade beyond appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.

You don’t understand our friendship.

An angry laugh. Then: I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting.

Please.

Of course, since his sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.

BUT I WASN’T thinking about any of that now. I was just hearing that horrible scream, my mind alive with dark imaginings. As I’d dressed and gathered photographs, I tried to calm myself by thinking of explanations for the phone call-maybe he’d lost his phone, or it had been stolen, and what I heard had nothing to do with him. Maybe he had left, was curled up in someone else’s bed right now, had tossed his phone in a trash can on his way out of our life. Obsessively, I kept hitting Send on my phone, getting his voice mail over and over. Eventually, with the sun rising, I’d headed out to report him missing but I’d wound up at his office instead, standing outside, hoping for something to end this nightmare before it began.

FINALLY, I WATCHED Rick strut up the street past the cute shops and trendy cafés, tapping on his BlackBerry oblivious to my waiting by the staircase. He was tall, lanky with a mass of black curls, a thin, carefully maintained beard and sideburns. He wore a pair of faded denims, a T-shirt that read Love Kills Slowly beneath a thick leather jacket hanging open in spite of the cold. He walked right by me, took the stairs easily, light on his feet.

“Rick,” I said.

He looked up startled from the slim black device in his hand. It took him a second to place me in this context. He didn’t look well, pale and exhausted, harried.

“Isabel,” he said, a frown sinking into his forehead. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” He looked around, behind me, up and down the street.

“Marc didn’t come home last night,” I said. I watched his brows lift in surprise, his eyes glance quickly to the left, then come back to me-thinking of a lie, a way to stall. Before he could come up with one, I asked, “Was he really here when I called?”

Rick shoved the BlackBerry into his pocket and looked down at the concrete. I noticed the debut of coarse, wiry grays in his hair, of ever-so-faint crow’s-feet around his eyes.

“No,” he said simply. “He wasn’t here. He never came back after his meeting yesterday. Never called.” I felt the cold wash of disappointment, a deepening of my fear. “Come inside, Iz. It’s cold.”

I followed Rick up the stairs, thinking, trying to establish a time line. Marcus hadn’t phoned me after his meeting as he’d promised to do. I’d starting calling around three in the afternoon to see how it went. At that point I wasn’t even remotely concerned; he was so often absent-minded about our personal life, totally focused on business during the workday. It wasn’t uncommon for him to forget promises to call. My calls to him went straight to voice mail-not uncommon, either. I wasn’t even that concerned when he didn’t come home for dinner. But as Rick and I neared the top of the creaky slim staircase, I had the ugly dawning that no one had heard from Marcus since early yesterday.

On the landing, I wrestled with the hope that we’d find him inside, having slept on the couch in his office, maybe hungover. Izzy, I’m sorry. Things went badly at the meeting. I went to have a drink and had too much. Forgive me. Even though nothing like that had ever happened before, I imagined it vividly as Rick punched in his security code, turned the key in the lock, and pushed open the heavy metal door. I imagined it so hard that for a moment it was almost true; I almost felt the flood of relief, the blast of fury.

But no. The office was silent, empty. Rows of desks, huge gleaming monitors, industrial-cool exposed vents and pipes in the ceiling. Marc’s glass-walled office was dark, orderly. As we moved into the space, the electronic tone of a ringing phone sounded like a bird trapped inside a computer. Ricky dropped his bag and ran for it.

I watched him until he gave me a head shake to let me know it wasn’t Marc or anything to do with him. I wandered into my husband’s office, opened the light on the desk. I saw Rick glance at me through the glass, the phone still cradled between his ear and shoulder, as I sat in Marc’s large leather chair, put my fingers on the cool metal of his desk. I stared at our wedding picture; we both looked so blissfully happy, it almost seemed staged. Behind us, a glorious sunset waxed orange, purple, pink. I sifted through a pile of papers and manila folders, glanced at sticky notes on the lamp and on the phone, looking for what I didn’t know. Then I booted up his computer. Rick entered while I was doing this; he looked uncomfortable.

“He doesn’t like anyone to be in here, Isabel.”

“Fuck off, Rick,” I said quietly, without heat.

He glanced down at his feet again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and hiked his shoulders up so high he looked like a vulture. I thought he was too old for the urban-chic look he was sporting. He needed a visit to Barneys, needed to maybe grow up a little. Marcus was the polished one in suit and tie, classic fashion with a trendy edge. Rick had fully cultivated his programmer-punk look and aura, down to the pasty white skin that seemed permanently bathed in the glow of a computer screen. I always thought it should be Marcus who interfaced with people, but he hated that part of the business. It was Rick and a team of account managers who pitched prospective clients, fielded inquiries, handled the ever-escalating needs of their customers. Marcus was the brains of the company, rarely seen but controlling everything. Rick was a little bit of a marionette. I wondered if he ever resented it.

“Do you know where he is?” I asked him. He opened his mouth to answer but I interrupted. “Do not lie.”

He seemed to look at something far behind me. I examined his face. What did I see there? Concern-maybe even a little fear. He shook his head, curls bouncing. “No, I don’t know where he is. I-I wish I did.”

“When he didn’t come back from his meeting, when he didn’t call all day-you didn’t think that was unusual? Cause for concern?”

He lifted his palms.

“What are you saying?” I asked, angry, incredulous. “That it wasn’t unusual?”

No answer. No eye contact. I saw a sheen of perspiration on his brow. I let the silence hang between us, hoping he’d fill it, but he didn’t. Finally, I told him about the phone call, trying to keep my voice even, to keep the sound of it out of my head. Rick sank into the seat across from Marcus’s desk, rested his head in his hand while I spoke.

When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I’m calling the police again.” I reached to pick up the phone.

“Wait,” he said, looking up, startled. No, not startled, stricken. “Just wait a second.”

I let my hand rest on the receiver. “Rick, what is going on?”

Then there was thunder on the stairs outside the entrance to the office. The door exploded open and suddenly Ricky was up from his seat and I was up from mine, so quickly the chair on casters went careening, crashing against the wall behind me.

We were both frozen as a dozen people stormed through the door, weapons drawn, dressed in black from head to toe except for the white letters emblazed center mass: FBI.

Time seemed to slow and stretch. The men fanned out, moving behind desks and through the loft like rats in a maze. We were spotted by a tall, lanky woman with short-cropped blond hair as she headed in our direction; she started yelling at us. Her words were unintelligible to me; all I could see was the gun pointed in our direction. I watched Rick put his hands on top of his head, lower his chin to his chest, and close his eyes.

I thought, He’s been waiting for this, expecting this moment. What have they done? I stood stunned, mute, my fingers touching the edge of Marc’s desk, feeling like the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was free-falling through space.

WHEN I MET Marc, I had already resigned myself to the role of spinster aunt. And I was actually okay with that, maybe even relieved, after the parade of losers and weirdoes I’d had trekking through my life over the previous years. I had started to see myself as a dating oddball, as the kind of woman who couldn’t manage to fit herself into a relationship. For me, the problem wasn’t meeting men, a very common New York City complaint. I couldn’t swing a dead cat without meeting a man-in the grocery store, in bookstores and cafés, on a subway platform. The problem was that no matter how auspicious the start, things just never lasted, never bloomed into anything permanent. I’d start to get that cool, apathetic feeling, begin to dread phone calls or zone out during dates. And if that didn’t happen, he’d stop calling me, eventually disappear altogether. I rarely even got to the ugly breakup phase. Generally, there was just a slow fade to nothing.

“You know, Izzy” my sister, Linda (married, two gorgeous kids, outrageously successful photographer, older than me by five years, thank God, or I’d have to kill her), said one night over conciliatory Pinot Grigio, “have you considered that there’s just no give to you? That you’re looking for someone to fit into your life exactly the way it is now? You’re not willing to bend or shift anything”

I bristled at this statement, thought it was patently untrue. “When it’s right, I won’t have to,” I said defensively.

An ever-so-slight eye roll, a sip of wine.

“Right?”

She held my gaze for a moment, gave a quick shrug. “Well, in a sense. But more like when it’s right you don’t mind so much doing a little shifting and bending.”

“Fight the good fight, Iz,” called Erik, the perfect husband, from the kitchen. “Make them bend.”

“Shh,” said my sister as he walked into the room. “You’ll wake them up.” The kids: Emily and Trevor.

“Did you bend?” I asked Erik.

“Hell, yes, I bent. I’m still bending.” He flopped his lean form onto the low suede chaise across from us, inviting himself into the sister talk session. He rolled his head back for maximum drama.

“Oh, please.” My sister smiled at him, eyes glittering, reaching out with her bare foot to knock him on the knee. The way she looked at him embarrassed me sometimes-naked adoration. They adored each other. There was none of that insidious bickering or sarcasm, none of the whispered comments or veiled insults so common in my friends’ marriages. Not that they never fought. Oh, they fought. But it was always so aboveboard, so earnest, and over quickly. Healthy; they were very healthy. Sometimes it made me sick.

I remember thinking that night, I’ll never have this. It’s just not going to happen. With this thought, instead of despair, my system flooded with a strange relief. I’d given up at twenty-eight years old. It felt good, a justified surrender.

“What about Jack?” She’d asked the question and I had answered it so many times that I just got up to refill my glass without comment.

AND THEN THERE was Marcus.

His first words to me: “I’m a big fan.”

I smiled and thanked him for his kindness, took the book he held out to me. The first thing I noticed about him were his hands, how large and strong they were. I’d just finished a reading from my recent novel in a small bookstore to a small crowd who had, with the exception of this gentleman, all promptly left without buying a single copy. Outside, the wind pushed at the door, causing the little entry bell to jingle. Snow fell in fat, wet flakes that didn’t bother to stick to the ground and make themselves pretty. I signed his book with a black Sharpie, thinking about my pajamas and down comforter, Seinfeld reruns. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the clerk at the counter issue a yawn. Other than the three of us, the store was empty; it was nearly nine o’clock.

I handed the book back to the stranger and then he just stood there for a moment, awkward. He was working up the nerve to say something. I expected him to start talking about the book he was writing, ask about getting an agent or publisher. But he didn’t.

“Thanks again,” I said. “I appreciate your coming out on such a terrible night.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.

I stood up then and took my coat off the back of my chair, barely registering the tinkling of the bell over the door. By the time I turned around, he was gone. I was so tired that night, so wanting to go home that, other than his hands, I hadn’t really noticed much about him, wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup. This was unusual for me. I absorbed details, energies, like a sponge, couldn’t even stop it if I wanted to. The curse of the writer. But not that night. Fatigue, maybe, or just a single-minded focus on trying to get home? Or was it something about him, his energy, that allowed him to be overlooked, go unnoticed? Whatever the reason, I didn’t think about him again as I said my farewells to the clerk and headed out onto the street.

He was waiting for me outside the door under a large black umbrella. I felt a little jolt of fear.

“I’m not a stalker,” he said quickly, lifting a hand. He must have seen the alarm on my face, how I quickly turned back toward the shop door. He released an uncomfortable laugh, glanced up at the falling snow, maybe embarrassed that he’d frightened me.

“Is it crazy to ask you to have dinner with me?” he said after an uncomfortable beat.

“A little,” I said, appraising him, looking into his eyes, assessing his body language. He was tall, powerful looking. His shoulders square, hand tense, gripping his umbrella. He didn’t look like a nutcase, with his expensive leather laptop bag and good shoes. He wore a dark wool pea coat, with a gray cashmere scarf. His eyes were stunning in the lamplight, a wide, earnest light blue. An amused smile played at the corner of his mouth; his jaw looked as if it belonged on a mountain somewhere. I realized I was shivering, all exposed flesh starting to tingle.

“Well,” he said, “go a little crazy with me, then. A public place, somewhere crowded.” His smile broadened. I could see that he was laughing at himself inside, at the situation. I found myself smiling, too, at his boldness, at his allure.

“When’s the last time you took a chance?” he asked, undaunted by my silence, by the way I must have been staring at him.

I might have just walked away, hopped a cab, and headed home. This is what I wanted to do, even started to move to the curb. But I had a rare moment of self-clarity: My sister was right about me. She’d said: You’re not willing to bend or shift anything to let someone into your life. Or something like that. I suddenly, passionately, wanted to prove her wrong.

I looked at him with fresh eyes; he was still waiting, still smiling. Most men would have already walked away, embarrassed, angry. But not Marcus. What he wanted, he got. He’d wait, if that’s what it took. Even then.

“Seriously,” he started, and it was in that word that I first heard the lilt of his very slight accent. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.”

I found myself laughing with him at that, and the next thing I knew, we were in a cab together, racing through the wet, cold night.

WE WOUND UP at Café Orlin, a dark and cozy spot, one of my favorite East Village haunts, and stayed there until the early hours, losing our sense of time and any self-consciousness either of us had, exploring the landscapes of each other’s past, talking about books-mine, mostly (his interest and knowledge were beyond flattering)-and art, and travel. It was effortless, comfortable. When we finally left, workdays looming, the snow had stopped and the frigid night lay out before us slick and crystalline as he walked me home. He reached for my hand and I let him take it. His skin was smooth and dry, his grip so hard and strong it felt as though his bones were made from metal. Heat flooded my body as our fingers entwined.

At the door to my building, I turned to face him. I’ll call you, I expected him to say. Or, Thanks for a nice evening. Something vague, something that left it all up in the air, something that later would have me wondering if the night had really been as special as I thought.

“Can I see you tonight?” he said. What? There were games to be played, protective walls to be erected, nonchalance to be feigned. He’d clearly misplaced his rulebook.

He must have registered my surprise. “Honestly, Isabel, I don’t have time for games.” Did he sound weary, in spite of his kind eyes, his gentle hand on my arm? “If you don’t want to see me again, in your heart you already know that. So just say it now. No hard feelings. But if you do-just say yes.”

I had to laugh. “Yes,” I said. “I want to see you again. Tonight.” I had plans-just dinner with Jack. I’d cancel them. I would bend and shift and let this man into my life. Why not?

“I’ll pick you up at eight,” he said, taking my hand and pressing it to his mouth. “I can’t wait.”

He left me swooning in the soft glow of street lamps as he walked quickly up my street and then turned the corner without looking back. I halfway didn’t expect to see him again. As I entered my building, I was already steeling myself for the disappointment that surely lay ahead.

RICK HAD BEEN taken into an inner office in handcuffs; he hadn’t even turned to look at me. He hadn’t even said one word, though I’d yelled after him, desperate, pathetic.

“Rick, please tell me what’s going on!” I watched until he’d passed through the doorway with two agents and was gone.

“We have questions, Mrs. Raine,” said the female agent. “So you will need you to wait here.” She took me firmly by the arm and led me back to Marcus’s desk.

I think it’s fair to say I lost it a little. I ranted, demanded answers, raged about Marcus’s disappearance. All the while, the tall blonde just looked at me like I was the most pitiable sight she’d ever seen. I eventually wound down, ran out of juice.

“Just have a seat, Mrs. Raine. There’s a lot to talk about,” she’d said, long on condescension, short on illumination. There was something strange about her. And she didn’t seem quite official. She seemed more like a stripper with a cheap, dirty kind of beauty. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her drop into a deep, wide squat, start taking off her clothes. She held me in her gaze for longer than seemed appropriate, then she strode out, all legs and attitude. She’d closed the door behind her.

Exhausted, numb, I allowed myself to slump in the chair and watch through the glass as hard drives were removed, files confiscated, desk drawers emptied of their contents. It was all very rote, once the guns had been holstered. No one seemed overly hurried, everyone clearly with expertise in their assigned task. All the agents avoided looking at me. After a while, the whole situation took on a strange unreality, like something I was watching on television, something I’d turned on too late and didn’t fully understand. I felt the bubbling urge to laugh at my predicament, followed by the urge to scream.

I noticed that none of the other employees arrived for work that morning. I imagined they were being turned away or taken into custody in the hallway downstairs. But I didn’t know.

It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t have to just sit here and obey like a good little girl. What if Marcus was in FBI custody? I’d asked but hadn’t received an answer. What if that’s why he hadn’t come home or been able to call? I felt a little lift of hope, a blast of adrenaline. Even if that wasn’t exactly an ideal scenario, at least it would mean he was all right. That I could help him. I realized it was time to call in the troops-Linda and Erik, my mother and Fred, Jack. And I needed to get us a lawyer. Fast.

I caught sight of my own reflection in the glass wall of Marc’s office. I looked slouched over, like an old woman, pale and harried. I wore a long black wool skirt and black leather ankle-high boots, a bulky sweater and wrap. My hair, long, past my shoulders, a black mass of unmanageable curls, was more chaotic than usual. I needed to pull myself together and take control of the situation.

I lifted the phone from the receiver and found the line dead. I looked up at the federal agents who were all still engaged in dissecting the office Marcus had worked so hard to build-months of renovation, hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and our own money. I walked over to the door and found it locked from the outside. My mouth and throat went dry with the debut of panic in my chest as I tried the knob again. They couldn’t do that, could they? Hold me here like that without charge, arrest, without letting me call anyone?

I started pounding on the door, moved over to the glass and started banging on that so that they could see me. But no one even looked up. I started to look at each of the people individually. One man had a deep red scar that ran from the corner of his right eye and disappeared into the collar of his black vest. He was stocky, had longish hair that hung, unwashed, to his collar. Another man had tattoos on his hands. There was a woman with a bright purple streak dyed into her white hair which she’d tried to hide under a stocking cap but which kept snaking out, dropping in front of her eyes.

I had a terrible moment of cold dawning, dread a lump in my abdomen, as I turned to see that the tall blond woman had entered the office. These people were not FBI agents. She had an ugly sneer on her face, held a large gun. It was more like a caricature of a gun, it was so dark and menacing, and yet it almost didn’t register with me. I found myself moving closer to her.

“What’s going on here?” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded.

“Marcus is wrong about you,” she said. “You’re going to be trouble, aren’t you?” The words landed like a spit in the face. She wasn’t even trying to hide her accent anymore. I recognized it right away.

“What did you say?” I asked. My voice came out in an incredulous whisper. “Who are you?” Though she was taller than me by about three inches, broader at the shoulders, stronger, I could see, at the legs and hips, I wasn’t afraid of her. In fact, I was overcome by the urge to put my hands on her long, white throat-gun or no gun. She seemed to register this; I saw her eyes widen just slightly. Then she raised her hand quickly and brought the gun across hard on my temple. I didn’t have time to ward off the blow, didn’t even really feel it. I just heard a loud, private thud inside my head. A curtain of red fell before my eyes and the next thing I saw were her thick black boots as the floor rose up fast to greet me, then a blue light. Then black.

4

Someone yelling, Help me! For the love of Christ, please help me! There was the stench of urine, over that a heavy odor of antiseptic. And something else, something sweet and metallic. Blood. The soft sound of busy footfalls racing back and forth. A phone ringing. Harsh white light, too bright. That phone kept ringing, like a lance through my brain. I tried to move and felt bottle rockets of pain behind my brow and down my neck. When I finally adjusted to the light, I saw Linda’s face. My sister. Her eyes were rimmed red, blue moons of fatigue beneath. Behind her, Trevor and Emily were huddled together, leaning against a white wall looking around them, with matching wide, green saucers for eyes. More curious than scared; they’re like that.

“Are you out of your freaking minds? We’ve been here for five hours. She has a head injury.” It was Erik’s voice, I realized, loud and booming with anger.

I was lying on a gurney parked in a busy, grimy hallway off an emergency room. I guessed it was St. Vincent’s in the Village. How I’d gotten here, I had no idea.

There was a measured, deadpan response to Erik’s ranting that I couldn’t quite hear. Something about two strokes and a gunshot wound. “She’s been unconscious for hours,” he said loudly. “You can’t tell me that’s not serious. She’s barely been looked at.”

“Sir, you will get out of my face,” responded a deep female voice, very stern and more loudly. “Sit down right now or you will be asked to leave.”

Erik had a bad temper when it came to things like this. When he felt at the mercy of a bad system, he generally blew a gasket-no doubt he would have exploded into an embarrassing string of expletives had his children not been present. But if he said anything else, I didn’t hear it.

Linda saw my eyes open and leaned in close. “Oh, Izzy, Izzy, Izzy,” she said, putting her hand on my forehead. “Oh my God, what happened?”

Why was she whispering? Then I saw the cop, a uniformed officer sitting in a chair about five feet from Emily and Trevor.

“I don’t know,” I said, gripping her hand and trying to sit up but lying back down. I told her how Marcus didn’t come home, how I went to the office, what happened there. The events of the night before and that morning came back in vivid snapshots; I was firing off frames of memory, my words coming out in a manic tumble. I wasn’t sure how much sense I was making as my sister stared at me intently. She’d always looked at me that way, even when we were girls, even when I was telling her the most trivial things. She listened. I felt my face flush with the powerful brew in my chest-anger, fear, despair.

I saw all of those things on Linda’s face, too. “Oh my God, Izzy. Why didn’t you call me?”

“Linda, where is he?” I asked, a sob escaping me, tears coming in a hot, wet stream. “What’s happening?”

She shook her head, looking as helpless as I was, gripped my hand. “We’ll figure it out,” she said bravely. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She was always the optimist. Not me. The way I saw it, things could only get worse, but I didn’t say so.

“Can I hold your gun?” Trevor had sidled over to the cop. Ten years old, blond as sunlight like Linda, and honey-sweet.

“Don’t be an idiot, Trevor,” said Emily, with an extravagant eye roll. Thirteen, hair the same inky black as mine but straight as razors, same major attitude problem.

“Emily,” said Linda. “Be nice to your brother. And Trevor, leave that officer alone.”

There was an unusually sharp, tense edge to her voice and both kids turned to stare at us. They were pampered children, treated tenderly at home and at school, rarely hearing an angry tone or unkind word. They both looked as if they’d been slapped. I’d never been sure how good it was for them to be treated so gently, worried that they’d be torn up when they stepped out of Montessori privilege and into the real world. Like right now.

The cop saw then that I was conscious, pulled a heavy black radio from his belt, turned away to talk. Something about the witness.

“Is that me? Am I ‘the witness’?” I asked my sister.

“They’ve been waiting to talk to you,” Linda said, nodding and rubbing her eyes.

“Who has?”

“The police,” she whispered, leaning in close. “They found you in the office. Izzy it’s been destroyed, everything stolen or smashed, spray paint everywhere. Someone called nine-one-one. You were unconscious behind Marc’s desk. They brought you here and called us. Detectives are supposed to come when you wake up.”

“Those people-they weren’t FBI agents,” I said in an absurd statement of the obvious.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “They weren’t.”

“Why didn’t they kill me?”

“Izzy!”

It wasn’t a lamentation; it was a question of pure curiosity. They should have killed me. I saw them all, could easily identify any of them and would likely be doing so shortly. But they hadn’t. Why not? To someone who constructed plot for a living, it seemed stupid, careless.

My sister put her head in her hand and I saw her shoulders start to shake a little. She always cried from stress or anger. Some people viewed it as weakness. But I knew it for what it was-her release valve. The kids crowded in around us, Trevor resting his head on his mother’s shoulder, Emily taking my hand. Trevor’s tangle of silky curls mingled with his mother’s.

“What happened to you, Izzy?” Emily whispered in my ear. Her breath smelled like fruit punch. She’d never called me “aunt” for some reason, and I was glad for it. That title seemed too formal, too old-fashioned, put a distance between us that I hoped she’d never feel. I squeezed her hand, looked into her worried face. She was rail-thin, and all hard angles, a cool city girl with a poet’s heart.

“I’m not sure,” I said lamely. She turned away, glanced toward the cop, who had returned to his seat and opened a copy of the Post. He seemed impervious to our drama, just putting in his time.

“Where’s Marcus?” Emily said, looking back at me. I tried not to cry again; one of us crying was enough. Children shouldn’t have to comfort adults.

“I don’t know, Em,” I managed, squeezing her hand.

“What do you mean?”

Trevor had turned his eyes up to me and both he and his sister looked frightened now. Then Erik came up behind them, put a hand on each of their shoulders. Both kids turned to wrap their arms around his middle.

“Okay, everyone,” he said, strong, light. He was not an especially tall man but there was a powerful, energetic force to him. Men liked him; women flirted with him. Everyone just felt better when he was around.

“Let’s all try to pull it together. Everything’s going to be fine.”

He had four sets of uncertain eyes on him. I saw him muster his strength.

“It is,” he said brightly. “I promise.”

IT WAS HOURS more before I was treated-a deep gash at my temple cleaned, stitched, and bandaged. I had a severe concussion, according to the very young doctor who attended to me. He warned me to care for the wound, take my antibiotics and rest.

“Or pay the consequences. Head injuries are very tricky. Not to be taken lightly.”

He was frighteningly pale, the skin on his hands nearly translucent, the veins beneath, thick blue ropes. He looked as if he lived day and night beneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs.

We were still in the emergency room, but in one of those curtained-off little areas no bigger than a shoe box, that same cop sitting outside. I could see his bulky shadow through the white gauzy barrier. The detectives who were supposed to come talk to me still hadn’t arrived.

“A blow to the temple can be fatal,” the doctor said gravely. “You’re very lucky.”

I didn’t have the will to answer him. My sister sat beside me on a tiny, uncomfortable-looking stool, holding my hand. Erik had taken the kids to his mother’s and afterward was planning to see what he could find out about Marcus, about the office break-in, if you could call it that. An odd calm had come over me; it was more like a brownout, the result of a brain short-circuit. You can only handle so much pain, fear, grief before your head switches off for a while. That’s how the psyche handles trauma. A clinical psychiatrist had told me this once during a research interview I was conducting for one of my novels; it made sense to me then. I understood it better now.

“Are you all right?” Linda asked when the doctor left. She’d repeated this question every fifteen minutes like a nervous tic since I’d regained consciousness.

“Can you just stop asking me that?”

“Sorry,” she said, straightening out her back, then arching it into a stretch.

“You sound like Mom.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, raising her palms in the air a little and then letting them drop to her thighs. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to get mean about it.”

“Did Erik call?” I asked.

She took her phone from her pocket and checked the screen, though we both knew it hadn’t rung. She shook her head. I opened my mouth but she interrupted me.

“I just tried Marc’s cell and your apartment five minutes ago.”

I closed my eyes. This wasn’t happening. I saw her face again, the blonde. What had she said exactly? Marcus is wrong about you. You’re going to be trouble, aren’t you? Every time I heard her voice in my head, I felt sicker and more despairing. Another phrase that was still burned in my memory started echoing as well, as much as I’d tried to forget it: I can still feel you inside me.

“That woman,” my sister said, reading my mind as usual. It has always been like this with us-calling each other simultaneously, finishing each other’s sentences, buying each other the same gifts. “Are you sure that’s what she said?”

“I’m sure.”

She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees. She got this careful, thoughtful look on her face that she gets when she’s trying to be diplomatic. “I’m just saying-you do have a concussion.”

“I know what I heard, Linda,” I said. I felt bad immediately for my nasty tone but didn’t apologize. Instead, I closed my eyes and turned away from her.

She was quiet for a second, but I heard her tapping her foot on the floor.

“Do you want me to call anyone?”

“Like who?”

“Like Jack?”

“No,” I said. “No. Do you ever stop?”

I heard her stand up, issue a light sigh. “I’m going to find some food for us,” she said.

“Good,” I said blackly. “Take your time.”

She rested a hand on my shoulder for a moment and then walked out. I heard her ask the cop if he wanted anything, which made me feel even worse for being such a bitch. Everyone always thought of Linda as the good girl, the sweet one. I was the black cloud. I was the bad sleeper, the finicky eater, the colicky baby, the one who gave our mother heartburn during her pregnancy. Even as adults, I was the one who forgot thank you notes, who was always late and didn’t return phone calls. She never forgot a birthday, never failed to send flowers to the funeral of a distant relative, not only showed up everywhere on time but looking perfect and with an exquisite hostess gift. One of my top ten most dreaded sentences: Your sister is such a treasure, followed by a pregnant silence in which the subtext So, what happened to you? might easily be inferred. If they only knew. Not that she wasn’t those things. Just that she wasn’t only that.

I was glad for a few minutes of solitude to let some tears fall in private with no one fawning, telling me it was going to be okay. But I wasn’t alone for long.

“Mrs. Raine?”

I turned at the male voice. “I’m Detective Grady Crowe.”

Strictly by my estimate, the fiction writer notices approximately fifty percent more details than other people. These details get filed away for future use. This happens in a millisecond and I’m only barely conscious of it. In the case of Detective Crowe: I observed the clean, close shave, the tidy crease in his pants, the studied way his blue shirtsleeves peeked out of his black suede jacket. I noticed the careful cropping of his dark hair, the high arch of his brows, the polite smile that didn’t manage to offset a hard glint in his eyes.

The fiction writer then uses these details to weave a narrative. I immediately assessed the man before me as a textbook overachiever, a person who paid close attention to fine points and appearances. Possibly in paying attention to these things, he occasionally lost sight of the big picture. Something about the straight line of his mouth made me imagine that he was relentless when it came to getting what he wanted, sometimes foolhardy, thoughtless, in his pursuit of it.

Often-usually-this narrative I create is very close to the truth but sometimes-only sometimes-it replaces the reality of a situation and keeps me from seeing things as they actually are. This is not a good thing.

Detective Crowe moved into the space without invitation from me and extended his hand. I sat up with difficulty and took it reluctantly. His grip was strong and warm, his nails perfectly manicured. He smelled like coffee. He lifted one of those carefully maintained fingers to his temple, raised his chin toward me.

“Someone got you pretty good.” I thought I saw a smile play at the corners of his mouth and it infuriated me.

“Do you find what happened to me funny, Detective?” I asked, trying for a withering tone, but really just sounding sad.

Any trace of the smile, real or imagined, vanished.

“Uh, no. Of course not.” His face took on an earnest expression as he removed a neat leather notebook and a stylish Mont Blanc from the lapel of his jacket. “I’m here to talk to you about your husband, Marcus Raine. About what happened at his office this morning.” He flipped open a wallet and I saw his gold shield and identification card.

In my relief to talk to someone official about what had happened, I unspooled the string of events that had occurred. I noticed that he tried to interrupt me a couple of times by lifting his hand. I ignored him, kept going. I almost couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop until he knew every horrible detail, as though getting it out, getting it on paper, would be the first step toward understanding, solving, fixing everything that had broken since Marcus didn’t come home last night. He dutifully scribbled in his notebook as I ran through everything. I heard his phone vibrating in his pocket a couple of times but, to his credit, he didn’t answer it. Occasionally, there were two of him, the real man and his doppelgänger, the shadowy double my brutalized brain was creating.

He asked a lot of questions: What led me to believe the people who stormed the office were there in an official capacity initially? The vests with FBI emblazoned in their centers. No, I didn’t ask for identification. Could I describe any of them? Yes, and I did so to the best of my memory. Would I be able to identify any of them from photographs? I think so, yes. Did my husband have enemies? Any illegal dealings that I knew of? Anyone who would want to cause harm to him, me, or the business? No, no, no, no, and no.

“What do you think she meant by that?” the detective asked finally, when we reached a lull. He’d stopped writing at some point, stood now with his legs spread a bit, his arms crossed in front of him, like a beat cop on a corner.

“How should I know?” I said, annoyed. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“But she knew your husband?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer; it was a loaded question. “Her statement seemed to imply that, yes,” I said finally.

The detective appeared to want to pace, kept turning a bit at the shoulder, but there wasn’t much room. He could only walk a step or two in each direction. I could hear his phone buzzing again.

“How was your marriage in general?” he said gently. “Sorry. I know it’s personal.”

“I don’t understand.” But I did.

“Were there problems?”

I saw a ring on his finger, a thick gold band. “Are there problems in your marriage?” I asked nastily.

“Yes, there are,” he said, perching on the stool that my sister had been using. “Mainly, I’m the problem. Or so I’m told. Separated more than a year, legally divorced three months ago, can’t bring myself to take off the ring. Stupid, right? She’s already engaged to someone else. Getting married in a week.”

I heard the hard edge of Brooklyn in his accent, Brooklyn in a prep-school cage. The gentleman cop with his nice clothes and fancy pen, but underneath he was a kid from the neighborhood, no doubt about it.

“Point is, I never saw it coming. I thought we were going to the Bahamas for our anniversary,” he said. “She’s going to the Bahamas on her honeymoon with another cop she met at the precinct Christmas party. How about that?”

I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve so much unwanted candor. Maybe it was just his shtick.

“Our marriage was fine. Not perfect,” I said with a shrug. “He had a brief affair a couple of years ago. It was long over. This is not about that.”

He gave a careful nod, rubbed at his chin but didn’t hold my gaze, seemed to look at some point above me. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t discern the pupil from the iris. I wanted to lie back down, I was feeling so light-headed-but I couldn’t stand the vulnerability of it. I stayed upright.

“And all that stolen computer equipment. Brand-new, right?” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. Over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth.”

“There was another break-in, right? Last month?”

“Yes,” I said slowly.

“Was there an insurance payout?”

I saw how things were adding up for Detective Crowe. “Where are you going with this?”

“Was there?”

“Yes,” I said. “A check for about a hundred and fifty thousand arrived-” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

“This week sometime?”

“It came Monday.”

“And where’s that money now?”

“Probably in the business bank account. I don’t have much to do with Marcus’s company. I don’t know.”

“Software, right? Razor Technologies.”

“That’s right.” An angry headache was starting, radiating out from the gash on my temple. The pain traveled down my neck and into my shoulders. The drugs they’d given me must have been wearing off.

“What kind of software?”

“Gaming software. They’re freelance designers, creating games for a variety of systems, as well as for cell phones and personal computers.”

“They do well?”

“It has been very lucrative. They sold a PC game to Sony last year called The Spear of Destiny and it was wildly popular, in fact. They have other clients, too. Smaller.”

“Like who?”

I searched my memory for names of other companies Marcus might have mentioned but I couldn’t remember. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“You don’t know?” He looked at me with a skeptical frown and a quick cock of the head.

“You know, I honestly don’t have that much to do with Razor Tech. And Marcus is really the brains of the company, conceptualizing games, writing the code, and running the business. Rick Marino, his partner, does most of the client interface.” Distantly, I remembered Rick Marino in handcuffs. But I hadn’t asked myself what happened to him if the people who stormed the office were not FBI agents. The possibilities lurked in the periphery of my awareness, nagging but not acknowledged.

The detective scribbled something in his book.

“Look,” I said, starting to feel a terrible constricting in my chest. “Something awful has happened to my husband. Are you going to help us?”

“Mrs. Raine,” he said softly. “I am here to help you. But I need to know everything about this situation before I can determine what happened to your husband.”

I nodded and finally decided it was time to lie back. He reached to help me but I held up a hand. I didn’t want him to touch me.

“Is there family we can call, somewhere or someone he might have gone to without telling you?”

I shook my head. “Marcus doesn’t have any family. His parents died when he was a boy. He was raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.

“Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”

“Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier break-in? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”

“A disgruntled employee?”

I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”

“I’ll look into it.”

I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.

“You okay?” I heard the detective ask.

I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him-the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.

“If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”

“Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.

“We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees-Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”

I tried to visualize their faces, to think of the last time I’d seen them. The company party we’d had at our apartment last year. Eileen was a game designer and artist. She was petite, bookish with round wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered Ronald, a sound engineer, as lanky and shy with a mild stutter. Were either of them married? Did they have kids? I couldn’t remember.

“I’m sorry,” he added, an afterthought.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat, coming out in a raspy whisper.

“We’ll find out,” he said, putting away his pad and pen. I could see he believed it but I already had the sense of a yawning black abyss opening in my life. I was about to tumble in and I really didn’t think Detective Grady Crowe was going to be of much help. I could already see he was out of his depth. I just didn’t realize yet that I was, too.

WHEN I TOLD my sister that Marcus and I were getting married, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. She didn’t know Marcus well yet, it was true. Our courtship had been short and intense. But I had fallen, hard and headlong. And he seemed to have, as well; he proposed just a few months after we’d met.

He took me to Prague and we stayed in the Four Seasons near Mala Strana. We’d rented a car and driven about an a hour to the small town where he’d been born and had lived until he left for good. There was no family for me to meet. His mother’s sister, the aunt who’d raised him, had died a year earlier, he explained, after suffering from ovarian cancer.

But we wandered through the quaint cobblestone streets with the tourists, stopping in shops and having a local beer at the pub. He knew everything about the history of the town, Kutná Hora, once the second most important town in Bohemia because of its silver mines, now just a side trip tourists make while visiting Prague.

He spoke with the locals in Czech, explained to me how things had been during the communist era. How there were lines around this block for oranges that had come from Cuba, how this thriving store once was just a hollow space with empty shelves, how the communist propaganda had been taught in that tiny school.

On the way back to the city we stopped at a small Bohemian restaurant which, with its heavy oak tables, wood paneling, and thick ceiling beams, could have been plucked from the Middle Ages, if it weren’t for the jukebox and the young thugs smoking cigarettes and drinking enormous glasses of beer at the bar. The waiter brought a giant cast-iron platter of meat and potatoes. We ate until we were stuffed.

He’d been quiet all day. Not sullen or morose; just contemplative, maybe a bit sad. I just assumed that it was hard for him to be back in the place where he grew up, where so much had been lost-his parents, his aunt. I didn’t press him to talk.

“Isabel,” he said when we were done with our meal and waiting for our dessert. His accent was heavier than I’d ever heard it, had been since we’d arrived in the Czech Republic, as if being home, speaking his native language, reconnected him to a part of himself he’d neglected, even tried to quash. “I never thought I’d bring anyone here. Never thought I’d want to.”

“I’m glad you shared this with me,” I said. “I feel so much closer to you.” He was looking at me attentively; I felt heat rise to my cheeks. He wasn’t handsome, not beautiful in the classic sense. But his intensity, the hard features of his face, had a kind of magnetic power that lit me up inside. He dropped his eyes to the table.

“I want to share everything with you,” he said softly. He reached into his pocket and slid a blue velvet box across the table toward me. “Isabel. Maybe it’s too fast. I don’t care. I could have done this the night I met you.”

I opened the box to see a gleaming, cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was breathtaking.

“Isabel,” he whispered, grabbing both my hands. “This is my heart. I’m giving it to you. I’d die for you. Marry me.”

I remember being stunned but nodding vigorously, tearing as he put the ring on my finger and came to kneel beside me and take me into his arms. People around us looked on; one woman, another American-I could tell by her Tommy Hilfiger sweater and khaki pants, but mainly by her sneakers-clapped her hands and released a happy little cry.

What had I expected to feel in that moment? I didn’t know. You see it from the outside, stylized and engineered to sell in films and commercials. You hear the stories your sisters and girlfriends tell. But you only know how it’s meant to feel. It’s one of those moments in your life, in your relationship-the markers, the milestones, the important snapshots. But I could only experience the moment as I experience everything, observing, narrating. How Marcus was as close to emotional as I’d ever seen him. How the men at the bar turned to look at us, one of them sneering. How the lights were too dim for me to really see the ring. How a truck passed by and caused the bottles on the shelves behind the bar to rattle slightly. And I observed myself: happy, surprised, and, dare I admit it, a little relieved that my life wouldn’t pass without this moment. From the outside, I supposed it looked very romantic. But that’s where romance dwells, isn’t it, in the observation? Inner life is far too complicated; one doesn’t feel romance. You feel love, and even that isn’t one note resounding above all others; it’s one element in the symphony of your emotions.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” my sister said. “You barely know him.”

Marcus and I had announced our engagement over dinner at my sister’s, and Linda and Erik had made all the appropriate noises; embraces were exchanged, there was the excited chatter about plans and when and where. But later in my sister’s bedroom while Marcus, Erik, and the kids tried out a new computer game Marcus was testing, Linda and I had the real conversation. I knew it was coming, of course, I’d seen her shoulders tense, noticed the brittle quality to her smile, the worried eyes.

“When it’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug. “Right?”

That’s when she started to cry, just tear a little, really. But still, it was enough to cause disappointment, and not a little anxiety, to wash over me.

“I thought you liked him,” I said, sinking onto the bed beside her.

“Izzy” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, then lowering them to mine. She took my hand. “He’s just so… cold. There’s something unavailable about him, something distant.”

I shook my head. “You just need to get to know him better,” I told her. “That’s all. It’s a cultural difference.” But there was a hard knot in my middle.

She nodded and tried to smile. “Just take your time with the wedding. You get to know him a little bit more before you dive in.”

I felt a lash of anger then. “You know what I think, Linda?”

“Don’t,” she said, lifting her hand.

“I think you don’t really want me to be happy in a relationship.”

“Stop it, Isabel.”

I lowered my voice to a whisper. I didn’t want everyone else to hear. “I think you’re happier when I’m unhappy. That you’re more comfortable when I’m alone so that you can be the one with everything-the great career, the perfect family.”

“That’s bullshit,” she spat, “and you know it. You know I’m right. That’s why you’re so angry. Christ, Isabel, he’s just like our father.”

If I didn’t love my sister so much, I would have slapped her. Instead, I got up and walked out of the room.

“Izzy” she called after me. I heard apology in her voice but I didn’t care. I told Marcus I wasn’t feeling well and we left soon thereafter.

I didn’t talk to my sister for almost two weeks-which felt more like two years. Eventually, she called to borrow a pair of shoes and things went back to normal-no apologies, no discussion, no resolution, just water under the bridge. Marcus and I were married six months later in a small church up in Riverdale near my mother and stepfather’s home. An intimate gathering of my family and friends followed. Marcus didn’t have anyone to invite. At the time, it didn’t really seem strange or sad. I don’t recall thinking about it. We were happy; that was the only important thing.

5

Detective Grady Crowe stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, leaving St. Vincent’s Hospital. He pulled his leather coat together and brought the zipper up beneath his chin, took the black knit cap from his pocket and slid it over his close-cropped hair.

It was rush hour. The streets were packed even downtown with people hustling back and forth, huddled against the frigid air. It was a Village crowd, hipper, more casual than what he’d see if he’d found himself in Midtown at this hour. Messenger bags slung across chests instead of briefcases gripped in tight fists, leather instead of cashmere, denim instead of gabardine.

He’d always liked the lower part of Manhattan best. He considered it more the real New York than Midtown, but less the real city than, say, Brooklyn. Shop windows glittered with Christmas decoration, horns sang in the bumper-to-bumper river of traffic on the avenue. In the air he could smell the wood of someone’s fireplace burning. He always liked that smell, especially in the city. It made the streets seem less hard, less impersonal when you could imagine someone cozy at the hearth, maybe drinking a cup of tea.

He weaved his way across Twelfth Street through the stopped traffic toward the waiting unmarked Caprice. Exhaust billowed from behind, glowing red in the parking lights. His partner sat talking on her cell phone, her Bluetooth actually-a little device clipped to her ear which also had a microphone. From a distance, it made her look like nothing so much as a schizophrenic having a passionate conversation with herself. He’d told her this. She’d called him a Luddite. He kept meaning to look it up.

Inside the car, the heat was kicking. His partner, Jez, kept it at nearly eighty degrees in the winter. She was small, couldn’t stand the cold. He didn’t complain. He’d been raised to give women what they wanted. You can fight, his father told him. You can bitch. If you’re a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul? Just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars. The old man was right about that. And with three sisters, Grady had occasion to learn early. But it was his wife who drove the lesson home-then drove off in his new Acura. Turns out lip service isn’t enough; you have to live the surrender.

“So… what happened?”

Crowe pulled out into traffic, cutting off a cabdriver who leaned on his horn.

“Crowe?”

“You talking to me? I thought you were still on your communicator. You know-beam me up, Scotty” He tried to add some electronic sounds to the joke but it came off lame. Jez gave him a smile, anyway. She was cool like that.

“Very funny. Yeah, I’m talking to you. What’d you get?”

In the movies, female cops were always hot. But on the real job, to Grady’s eyes, they were generally pretty butch-dirty mouths, pumped biceps, chopped hair. Jesamyn Breslow was the exception, though he wouldn’t say she was hot exactly. She was cute. Definitely on the femme side comparatively speaking. But in spite of that button nose and blond bob, she was tough in a very real way, minus the self-conscious bravado of most cops, male or female. She knew kung fu. Really.

He relayed the story the victim had told him about her husband not coming home, about the phone call, and the people posing as FBI agents. It gelled with what they’d found, the vests discarded at the scene with the white letters stenciled on. It was a rush job. Someone who hadn’t already been distraught and overwhelmed might have noticed right away that the letters were sloppy, unprofessional.

“She thinks she’d be able to identify some of the people if she saw them again, but beyond that she doesn’t know anything about what happened, or why,” he said, reaching for the coffee in the cup holder. It was as bitter and stone cold as his ex-wife. He drank it, anyway.

“You sure? You know you’re a sucker for a pretty face.” They’d seen her picture on Marcus Raine’s desk. Jez had recognized her, was actually carrying a paperback of one of her novels in her bag. Isabel Connelly, her maiden name, on the jacket. Not Isabel Raine, her legal, married name.

“I’m sure,” he said. “She was a mess.”

Isabel Raine looked like a doll someone had dropped by the side of the road-bashed up, broken, and abandoned. He’d had the urge to dust her off, tuck her into a little bed somewhere.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“She gave us permission to look around her apartment. Said she’d call the doorman to let us in.”

“No lawyer?”

“Not yet. She’s focused on finding her husband. She thinks that’s the major problem, that he’s missing and something’s happened to him.”

“Maybe she really doesn’t know anything.”

He gave her a quick glance, raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve still got my wits about me. Not all your partners fall in love with the victim and go off the deep end.” He was referring to Mateo Stenopolis, her partner when she was with Missing Persons. Stenopolis had fallen in love with a missing girl and pretty much laid waste to his life and his career trying to find her-nearly getting himself and Breslow killed in the process.

“No,” she said with a laugh. “You’re no romantic, Crowe.”

“Just ask my ex-wife.”

He listened as Breslow called her mother, told her she’d be late picking up her son, Benjamin. He found himself thinking that it was the one small mercy in his failed marriage-no kids. He saw how Breslow struggled with her on-again, off-again husband and the child they shared. You’re bound forever by that life you created. As it was, there was nothing to bind him to his ex, nothing at all. They split what little money there was and that was that. He’d wanted kids, a lot of them. But she hadn’t-maybe one, eventually. She was concerned about her career, didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom like her mother, not on a cop’s salary. His mom had raised four on far less than he made, had never even had a job. She’d gone straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s. Bringing this up didn’t make things better.

“Those were different times, Grady” she’d countered. “Besides, you think your mother’s happy? I’ve never heard your parents exchange one kind word-hell, I’ve never even seen them kiss each other.”

She was always talking about “happy” like it was a lottery she was waiting to win. As far as Grady was concerned, happiness was just where you decided to lay your eyes. You see three people dead in a downtown office, their faces contorted in such a way that you understand they died in agony, you feel bad. You go home and find the woman you love and your kids waiting for you, you feel happy. That simple.

“Obsessing about your ex again?” asked his partner, examining her cuticles.

“How could you tell?”

“You make this kind of tiny chewing motion with your jaw, like you’re biting on your tongue a little. You do that whenever you’re working some kind of problem in your head.”

“You don’t know everything,” he said.

“No. I don’t. But a year sitting here and I’m getting to know you. My advice: If you can’t let it go, get help. It’s turning you into a sour pain in the ass. You talk about it constantly and you think about it more. Move on, Crowe.”

“Thanks, Dr. Phil.” He knew she was right. He was a dog with a bone; he just couldn’t stop worrying it, looking for that last bit of marrow.

Apparently satisfied that she’d made her point, she went back to business. “I put the information we had on Marcus Raine-date of birth, Social Security number-into NCIC and Vi-CAP. I’m waiting to see what comes back.”

“The wife seems convinced that he’s a victim in this. She’s seriously rattled by that phone call, thinks it was him screaming.”

“What do we believe?” she asked, really just thinking aloud.

“Could go either way. We need to dig deeper.”

THEY PULLED UP to Isabel Raine’s building and parked in the half-circle drive. The doorman was expecting them, gave them a key and told them to take the elevator to the ninth floor. Crowe was a little surprised by the lack of questions, but the doorman was as stoic and grim-faced as a gargoyle, his silver hair slicked back so perfectly it looked shellacked. He apparently had his orders from Isabel Raine and wasn’t interested in anything further. Crowe could see he was an old-school New York City doorman, served the tenants of the building, kept his mouth shut except for niceties, and collected his big Christmas tips.

“When was the last time you saw Marcus Raine?” Crowe asked him, after writing down his name, telephone number, and address. Charlie Shane lived up in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, almost the Bronx.

“Yesterday morning, just after nine,” Shane answered immediately. “He was heading off to work, I assumed. His departure was only notable because it was later than usual. Generally, he’s gone by seven. Mrs. Raine works from home and comes and goes during the day unpredictably.” Something about the way he leaned on that last word told Grady that, in Shane’s world, unpredictability was not a good thing.

Crowe was about to ask about Shane’s schedule but the doorman anticipated the question. “I work Monday through Saturday, from six A.M. to six P.M., sometimes later. I’ve worked in this building for twenty-five years.”

Grady looked at his watch. “Working late tonight?” he asked. It was going on seven o’clock.

“The night-shift doorman, Timothy Teaford, hasn’t arrived,” said Shane. “I can’t leave until he does.”

“He call?”

“No.”

“Unusual behavior?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Can I get the name and address of this guy?”

“There are two other part-time doormen who take the evening shifts and rotate the Sunday shifts. But naturally, they don’t have the same relationship with the tenants and the building that I do.”

“Of course not,” Crowe said gravely. “I’ll still need their names and contact information.”

“Of course, sir.”

Crowe saw Breslow looking around at the lobby that opened into a courtyard with a tall stone fountain turned off for the winter. She had the class not to gawk or comment, but he could tell she was impressed. He’d seen plenty of lobbies like this one-the high ceilings, the marble floors, the large pieces of art, the plush furniture. He was Bay Ridge born and raised, working class to the bone, but had attended Regis High School in Manhattan. Regis had competitive admissions, tuition free to those who got in, so the socioeconomic structure was more diverse than at other area prep schools. But plenty of his friends and classmates were the children of the very wealthy, were now the very wealthy themselves-doctors, lawyers, writers, newscasters. He could be living like they were. But Grady had always wanted to be a cop like his father.

After Regis, he attended New York University, though he’d been accepted at Princeton, Georgetown, and Cornell. He just didn’t understand spending all that money. Even with the partial scholarships he’d been offered at those schools, the tuition seemed staggering. His parents would have helped, but it would have left nothing for his sisters. NYU gave him a free ride. He joined the NYPD as soon as he graduated.

He had the sense that his family was disappointed. They’d expected something more. His father was the least pleased of all. “All that hard work you put in,” he lamented. “You could have gone to public, skipped college altogether, if all you wanted out of your life was to chase skells.” Like most blue-collar guys, his father had a strict and simple formula for determining success: income minus effort. Police work was hard and dangerous and you’d never get rich as an honest cop. It was bad math. You ended up giving more than you got. But the Jesuits didn’t measure success that way; neither did Grady.

Because of his education, because of a year doing the most dangerous work on a South Bronx buy-and-bust detail, and because of one flashy arrest, he got his gold shield fast. Five years on the job and he was a homicide detective. Too fast for some of the guys with more years on. Because of this, Grady wasn’t as popular as his old man had been. “Fuck them,” his dad advised. “They’re crabs in a barrel, people like that.”

After Shane gave them the names and contact information of the other doormen, Grady and Breslow took the elevator up to the ninth floor and walked down the long hallway over plush carpet.

“I think we’re in the wrong line of work,” Jez said, running a finger along the wall.

“No doubt about it,” Grady answered, just to be sociable. He appreciated nice things-good clothes, upscale restaurants-but he was unimpressed by opulence. He knocked heavily on the door, modulated his voice to be deeper than it normally was.

“NYPD. Open up, please.” He knocked again hard for emphasis.

They waited a full thirty seconds, knocked one more time, then Grady unlocked the door and pushed it open. He could see from where they stood that a vase lay shattered in the entrance hallway.

They moved to either side of the door, drew their weapons, and stepped carefully inside. They went through the apartment, room by room, checking closets, making sure the place was empty. When they were sure it was, they holstered their weapons. Jesamyn called for uniforms and a crime-scene team.

The stunning duplex with its hardwood floors and high ceilings, gleaming gourmet kitchen, second-floor master bedroom suite, had been trashed. Furniture was slashed, drapes shredded, shelves dumped, pictures shattered. Grady could see that two computer CPUs-one in the upstairs office off the bedroom and the other at a desk in the kitchen downstairs-were gone, monitors left with cords cut, just like at Razor Tech. A file cabinet hidden inside a closet stood completely empty, drawers gaping like mouths. In the master bathroom, someone had dumped a bottle of red nail polish over a framed black-and-white photo of Isabel Raine walking on the beach with a big dog and two kids. The polish was not quite dry.

Back downstairs, Grady surveyed the living room. Somehow the damage inflicted seemed angry, frenetic. A row of family photos had been swept from a shelf and stomped upon, cushions had been slashed, bleeding white stuffing. A chinz couch had been scribbled on with indelible marker. It seemed a lot more personal than the damage done in the office space.

As Grady stepped further into the room, he heard glass crunching beneath his feet. He looked down to see a ruined photograph of Isabel and Marcus Raine. She had her arms wrapped around his neck, her head thrown back in laughter, while Marcus stared directly at the camera, his eyes serious, his smile just a slight turning up of the corners of his mouth. The frame had been stomped on, the glass directly over Isabel Raine’s face was smashed. But Marcus Raine’s face, somehow, was untouched.

Jesamyn came to stand beside him. “Wow,” she said, looking around the wreckage. “Someone’s angry.”

He gazed at Isabel’s smashed image. “Very,” he said. “Very angry.”

“So how’d they get in?”

They looked at each other.

“One of the doormen,” said Breslow, answering her own question, as they moved quickly from the apartment. Grady paused to lock the door behind him as Jez moved down the hall to call the elevator.

“The six P.M. to six A.M. guy hadn’t shown up yet when we arrived,” said Crowe as the doors shut and the elevator moved down the shaft. “That polish in the bathroom was still wet. They were here during Shane’s shift.”

“Twelve-hour shifts?” mused Breslow. “Is that legal?”

“I don’t know,” said Crowe. “I guess that’s the job. You do it or you don’t.”

“Who signs on for twelve hours of catering to rich people, letting in their maids, accepting packages, dry cleaning?”

“The doorman gig; it’s like a thing, you know. An identity. A history of service.”

“Service to the rich? No thanks.”

Crowe didn’t think their job was that different. Protect and serve. Not just the rich, no, but the rich always wound up getting the best service-the fastest response time, the most respect-didn’t they? Even from the cops. If your brother plays golf with the senator, then people care when your daughter gets raped or your wife mugged. In the projects, girls are raped, people robbed every day. It doesn’t make the news. Sometimes the uniforms don’t even show. When they do, their disdain, their apathy is apparent. Not always, but often enough. He worked the South Bronx for years; he knew how those guys felt about the perps, and the vics, too. Attitudes were very different in Midtown North, where the rich lived and worked.

Charlie Shane was gone when they arrived back in the lobby. His replacement was a skinny, disshelved-looking guy with a five o’clock shadow and an untended shrub of dirty-blond hair.

Crowe pulled out his notebook and flipped through a couple of pages to find the guy’s name. He wrote down everything in his notebook-details, thoughts, observations, questions. He figured it would come in handy one day when he wrote his novel. Until then it kept him sharp; writing down what people told him helped his recall. What he couldn’t recall was always there.

“Timothy Teaford?” he said as they approached.

“Yeah,” he said. He seemed even younger up close, and sleepier. Crowe noticed a tattoo snaking out of his cuff, looked like one of those tribal bands that were so popular these days. Crowe identified himself, explained the situation as Breslow made some more calls.

“That’s messed up,” Teaford said. “They’re nice people. Good tippers.”

“Late for work today?”

“I’ve been sick,” he said. “Missed my shift last night. Flu.”

Crowe felt Breslow shifting backward slightly. She was totally germphobic. “You don’t have kids,” she’d said when he first teased her about this. “Benjy gets a cold? That can trash two weeks-sleepless nights, ear infection if it doesn’t go away, trips to the doctor. A flu? Forget about it.”

“Can anyone confirm you were home last night?”

He shrugged. “My girlfriend brought me Taco Bell and we watched a movie. She spent the night.”

“So who covered your shift here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I called in. I don’t know who he got to cover.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“Charlie Shane. He’s the supervisor.”

Grady looked back through his notes. Shane didn’t mention Teaford missing his shift, only that he’d been late this evening.

“Where is he now? Still in the building?”

“Actually, the weird thing is, he wasn’t here when I showed up. No one was. The door was locked and the desk was empty. One of the residents had to let me in.”

“Unusual behavior for him?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Teaford. “I swear that guy would put a cot in the office and live here if they’d let him.” He issued the sentence not with mockery but with a kind of youthful wonder, as if job dedication was something he just didn’t understand, something from another era, like dinosaurs. “Honestly, I can’t imagine him leaving the desk until someone showed up.”

“Did he leave a note?” Breslow asked. She’d ended her call with Dispatch and was poised to dial again.

Teaford shook his head. He really was a mess-his uniform wrinkled, some kind of old washed-in stain on his collar. Crowe could see a little yellow crust in his eye. But there was something sweet about him, something innocent and appealing.

“You got a way to reach him?” Crowe asked.

Teaford leaned down, squinted, and read a number that Crowe could see was taped on the desk. Jez dialed and waited. “Voice mail,” she said after a minute.

“Mr. Shane, this is NYPD Detective Jesamyn Breslow. You need to call us or return to the building immediately.” She left her number.

“All the time I been here, I never got voice mail on that number. He always answers,” Teaford said with a concerned frown. “You think he’s okay?”

Crowe wasn’t as worried about Shane’s well-being as he was about not having had an instinct about the guy, about one of them not staying down here while the other went up. Not that it would have been smart, or even protocol, for one of them to enter the apartment alone, especially considering what they found.

“I called for uniformed officers to go wait at Shane’s apartment in the unlikely event that he just went home,” said Jez. She was all action, no dwelling on mistakes or wasting time second-guessing. She just worked in the present tense. He’d read somewhere that this quality, the ability to operate in the framework of how things are, not how you wish they were or think they should be, was the factor that separated those who survived extreme circumstances from those who didn’t. He might have brooded for ten more minutes before doing what she’d already done.

She was at the elevator, clicking her pen vigorously on the palm of her hand, a very annoying nervous habit she had, as he finished getting Teaford’s girlfriend’s name, address, and phone number and telling him to stay put. Teaford looked scared when Crowe glanced back at him, but he didn’t look guilty, not to Crowe. But what did he know? He’d already made one mistake in judgment; it wasn’t so far-fetched that he’d make another.

“Stop fuming, Crowe,” Jez told him. “We couldn’t have known.” She’d stepped into the elevator and was holding the door.

“It’s our job to know.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s our job to find out”

He looked back at the doorman, who was now talking on his cell phone. “I’ll wait down here until the uniforms arrive.”

“Suit yourself.” She released the doors.

“Don’t touch anything until the techs get here,” he said. He saw her roll her eyes as the doors shut.

A minute later, he heard the approach of cruisers-this wasn’t an emergency call, but cops liked to turn on lights and sirens to get around fast, to have some fun in an otherwise slow precinct. He remembered the adrenaline rush of the car speeding through the city streets, especially at night. It was the coolest feeling in the world, as if everything else gave way while you raced into the fray. Sometimes they’d turn down their radios so they couldn’t hear when a chase had been called off, when they’d been ordered to let the perp-car thief, armed robber, whatever kind of scumbag-get away instead of risk civilian lives on the street with a car chase. They wanted to catch the skell they were pursuing; the adrenaline and testosterone racing through their systems demanded release, satisfaction. This was why so many car chases ended with the perp getting the crap kicked out of him. This was why the chases got called off.

His father frowned on this type of behavior. “The heroes are the guys that come home every night to their families,” he used to say, “who protect themselves and their partners so that they can live to be the men their wives and children need.”

Crowe heard the wisdom of this, but when you were doing eighty on Broadway, and the sirens were wailing, and some guy was bleeding out in a liquor store, shot by the punk trying to get away with it, you just forgot.

6

I woke up the next morning in my sister’s guest room. I wasn’t alone. Emily and the family dog, Brown, had both climbed into the queen-size bed and made themselves at home. Brown was on my feet, and Emily had spooned her narrow body up against me. I was glad for the company. Otherwise, the despair that swept over me in the moments after I opened my eyes might have washed me away entirely.

I had the dark thought that I wished that blow to the temple had killed me. It would have been easier than swimming the ocean of grief and fear and wonder that surely lay ahead. I squeezed Emily closer to me, drew in the scent of her shampoo.

The pain medication I took after the detective left the night before had successfully erased the questions he’d asked and their implications for the remainder of the evening. Now the physical pain had returned, and with it, his words. My agitation grew and, finally, I slipped from the bed. Emily didn’t stir but Brown lifted his sad Labrador eyes. He issued a grunt to let me know I’d disturbed him and then moved into the space I’d occupied before closing his eyes again. He was Emily’s dog; where she went, Brown followed.

I took off the pink flannel pajamas I was wearing-Linda’s “mommy pajamas”-unflatteringly baggy, ultra soft from a thousand washes, with some kind of indeterminate washed-in stain on the sleeve. I didn’t remember putting them on. I climbed into my clothes from yesterday, which were lying on the chair by the window, and quietly left the room. It was my plan to leave without waking anyone; otherwise, I knew they’d try to stop me and probably succeed. I needed to leave, get back to my own apartment, start trying to understand what was happening. But Erik was already up, drinking coffee at the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room.

Their home was a spacious loft, with high ceilings and tall windows. The morning sun, bright and warm, entered unabated by blinds. The room, decorated with simple, low furniture in bone and brown tones, large-format oils painted by my sister-a talented painter as well as a gifted photographer-on the walls, eclectic pieces of sculpture from their various travels, was once as clean and elegant as the interior of a museum. But they’d been invaded, their evolved sense of style sacked and pillaged by the smaller members of the family.

Trevor’s T-shirt was draped over the chaise. A tall pile of Emily’s books threatened to topple from the suede couch (which also sported a grape-juice stain that had never been successfully removed). There was a small stuffed chair shaped like a hippo and a video game system attached to the large flat screen, an unfinished game of Monopoly on the cocktail table. Brown’s doggy bed was covered with his hair. The stainless-steel refrigerator, visible from where I stood, was covered with drawings, magnets, pictures, and stickers.

I didn’t say anything to Erik, just moved over to my bag, which slouched by the door, checked to see if my keys and wallet were in there. It was then that I noticed my ring was gone. I stared at my naked hand, the indentation on my finger. How could I not have noticed it before? I looked up at my brother-in-law, who was watching me from the stool where he perched.

“Did you take it off at the hospital?”

He didn’t ask what I meant. “No,” he said gently. “It was gone when we first got to you. I’m sorry, Iz. Your sister realized right away. We just thought-why say anything until you noticed. Insult to injury.”

I saw her face again, the woman at Marc’s office-that pitying, disdainful expression. That bitch took my ring.

Erik had come over to me while he was talking. I let him put his arm around my shoulders and lead me over to the couch. As I sat down heavily, Emily’s pile of books softly tumbled to the floor. We let them lie. In the corner of the room a massive Christmas tree was a riot of ornaments and multicolored lights. Its manic twinkling was too much for my tired eyes.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to leave,” he said. I noticed purple circles under his eyes, an unfamiliar stiffness to his mouth.

“I have to go home, Erik,” I said. “I have to…” I let the sentence trail.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped. I wanted to rage but I managed to keep my voice low. I didn’t want to wake my sister; I didn’t want to look into her worried face. “Search the apartment? Look for clues? Find out what the hell happened to my husband?”

He nodded his understanding. “The police are working on that. You need to take care of yourself right now.” He tapped his temple, reminding me of the wound on my head. “Let us take care of you.”

I stood suddenly and moved back toward the door. He didn’t try to stop me; it wasn’t his style. He was the kind of guy who said his piece and then backed off, let people make their own decisions. He sank into the place where I had sat a moment earlier.

“There’s something, Izzy” he said as I was lifting my bag and reaching for the lock. He rubbed his eyes and released a breath. “I’ve been debating whether or not to tell you.”

I felt a thump of dread in my center. “What?”

He kept his head down for a second and then looked up, not at me but at a point above me. Something about his expression caused me to return to him, to sit kitty-corner from him in the chair. He’d been a brother to me since he fell in love with Linda. I loved him for that, for the father he was, and for the husband he was to my sister.

“I gave Marcus money. A lot of it.”

He was fair like Marcus, but with a boyish sweetness to him, a bright, open look to his face, where Marcus might seem stern. Marcus’s body was hard, no fat, sinewy. Erik’s body, while lean and toned, had a softness to it. His embrace was a comfort in a way that Marcus’s wasn’t. You could sink into Erik; he enfolded you. Marcus’s body held its boundaries, almost pushed you away. I noticed these things about my husband and my sister’s husband. Was I comparing them? Only in the way of the observer, defining things by their differences, seeking the telling details.

“I don’t understand,” I said. But I was starting to, slowly.

He cleared his throat and I noticed that his hands were shaking a little. “About a month ago, he came to me and said he needed investors. He had a new game in development and when it was finished it was going to revolutionize gaming, take things to a whole new level of realism.”

I shook my head slightly. I had no idea what he was talking about. Marcus had never mentioned anything like that to me.

“He showed me,” he said, pointing over to the flat screen mounted on the wall. “The graphics, they were… amazing. There’s no other word for it.” He kept his eyes on the screen as if he was still seeing the images there. “He said people in on the ground floor stood to double their investment, at least. He wanted Linda and me to benefit from that. I had no reason to doubt him, you know? He was family. His business was already a big success.”

“How much did you give him, Erik?” I said, reaching for his hand.

“A half a million,” he said, pulling his hand back and resting his head on it.

He knocked the wind out of me; I released a big rush of air. I thought about a recent conversation I’d had with my sister-about private-school tuition for Emily and Trevor, about building maintenance, taxes, health insurance, life insurance, car insurance, even the parking space for their car-how their cost of living was so high it was painful, even though by most standards they were wealthy people. She said it was crushing her. That was the word she used: crushing.

“You guys don’t have that kind of money do you?” I asked. “Just five hundred K lying around?”

“Uh, no,” he said. “We don’t.” He swept his arm to indicate the space around us. “We do okay, but it’s not like that. I borrowed against the loft.”

My sister was not a financial risk taker. She’d paid off the loft years earlier, after her first major gallery show, and the property had steadily been growing in value ever since. My sister was more successful than most, but an artist’s income was unpredictable year to year. That loft was her security blanket, her “lifeboat,” she called it. It had appreciated wildly over the last decade and was worth a fortune. If everything went to hell financially, they could sell it and live off the money for a good long time. She needed that kind of security to be happy, to feel like a good mom. She needed to know that she’d always be able to provide for Trevor and Emily. I knew all the reasons why this was so critical to her mental well-being-and so did Erik.

“Linda would never agree to that,” I said.

The color had drained from his face and he’d pressed his mouth into a thin line. Then I understood.

“She doesn’t know?” I said.

“You know how Linda is,” he said, hanging his head. “She doesn’t like to talk about money.”

“You did this without talking to her?”

He lifted a hand. “It was supposed to be short term, Izzy” he said. He stood up and walked over to one of the tall windows. I glanced uneasily at the door to their bedroom, imagining that I saw Linda there, her hair tousled, her eyes bleary with sleep. What are you guys talking about? But the door was firmly closed. He went on, talking so softly that I could barely hear him.

“In two months, Marc said, they’d make the sale, the biggest in the history of Razor Tech. They’d had early interest from two of the big game companies; he expected a bidding war. I’d have my principal investment back plus five hundred thousand more, at least. I’d pay off the loan on the loft and put the rest in the bank. Then we’d have that; she’d have the security she needs. She’d never have to worry again. That’s what I was thinking.”

“But you couldn’t get credit like that without her signature, Erik, could you?”

He’d given up a successful career in information technology after Trevor was born so that Linda could work and the kids wouldn’t be cared for by strangers. He’d managed her career, everything from sales to publicity to Web site design and maintenance, taken care of the accounting, helped with the kids. It always seemed like the perfect arrangement, one that made them both very happy. Everything was joint; there were no separate accounts, separate incomes.

“She signed,” he said, resting the heels of his hands on the windowsill. The window looked out onto another building of artists’ lofts, where many residents shared my sister’s aversion to blinds. “She just didn’t read what she was signing.”

“Oh, Erik.” Crushed. I knew my sister; she was going to buckle under the weight of this.

“If it had been anyone else, I never would have even considered it,” Erik said urgently, turning back to me. He must have seen the look on my face, wanted me to understand. “But Marc’s a genius, you know? And he’s family.”

His reverent tone reminded me of a peculiar energy I’d always picked up on between my husband and brother-in-law. Linda had laughingly claimed that Erik had a boy crush on Marcus, like Marc was the cool kid at school and Erik just wanted to hang around him. I’d noticed it, too. I’d also observed that Marcus seemed to realize it as well, and how he appeared to enjoy it. But I figured it was harmless-at least they got along. They were buddies, met for drinks after work, took the kids to the country so that Linda and I could spend the day at Bliss, our favorite spa.

“I wasn’t trying to deceive her, Izzy Understand that. I was trying to surprise her.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything, just stared across the street.

“He was supposed to pay me back yesterday, Izzy. I was supposed to meet him for lunch and he was going to give me a check. But he never showed.”

I watched a woman in a loft across the street move through a series of yoga poses, her impossibly thin body limber and strong. Another young woman chased a naked toddler across an apartment on another floor, both of them laughing. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard him. I was just waiting for the words to sink in. Their implication echoed all the things Detective Crowe had said and not said the night before.

“He wouldn’t cheat you, Erik,” I said, my voice sounding weak. “He wouldn’t. Something’s happened.”

Erik nodded, seemed unable to find words. I didn’t like the expression on his face. Something dark. Something desperate.

“Did you tell the police?” I asked.

He nodded. “They know; I’m sorry. It felt like a betrayal but it could be… relevant.”

I wish I could say I was numb from the shock but I wasn’t. I felt as if I was standing in the middle of a city that was being bombed from above. I didn’t know where to run as everything solid around me crumbled to dust. My body was flooded with adrenaline, in full fight-or-flight response.

Erik rested his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry, Izzy. This is not your problem. You have too much to deal with right now. I just didn’t want you to find out from the police.”

“It is my problem. Of course it’s my problem, Erik.”

“No,” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “No.”

“Does she know yet?” I asked him.

He released a heavy breath. “Not yet. I need to figure out how to tell her. I…” He just kept shaking his head, his eyes opening and drifting over to the closed door of their bedroom where she lay sleeping. He never finished the sentence.

“Don’t tell her,” I said, leaving him. I grabbed my bag and unlocked the door. “Give me a little time.”

“Wait, Izzy” he said, following. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something that’s not just sitting around here watching all our lives go to hell.”

ON THE STREET it felt good to be moving. I walked off the curb and lifted my arm at the sea of traffic that was flowing up Lafayette. An old woman in a dramatic, hot-pink pashmina wrap and long coat walking three white standard poodles stared at me. I remembered the large bandage on my head, lifted a hand to touch it as I slid inside the cab that pulled over.

“Hospital?” the driver wanted to know. I couldn’t tell if he was being a smart-ass or not.

“Eighty-sixth between Broadway and Amsterdam,” I told him. I wanted to go home, to examine the place that housed my life with Marcus, to tear it apart if necessary, piece by piece, in an effort to find out what had happened to my husband. There was no place for fear or grief in my mind; I was nothing but my hunger to understand what was happening to my life. In the days to come, this single-minded focus, this terrible drive would be responsible for some very bad decisions and horrific outcomes. Of course, I had no way of knowing that as my cab raced uptown; I was just doing what I knew how to do.

7

From three stories above, Linda Book watched her sister hail a cab. She knocked on the window, then struggled to open it, but the damn thing was stuck. It was no use, anyway. Linda could just see the black of Isabel’s hair, the white of the bandage on her head as she disappeared and closed the door behind her. She watched the cab speed off, thinking, She’s going home, no doubt. Trying to figure it all out. Trying to fix what was broken, to make it right again. Linda released an exasperated breath at her sister’s stubborn streak, which was all the more annoying because it was a trait they shared.

She leaned her head against the window for a moment, considered her options: Call her? Chase after her? Leave her be? She decided to leave her to it. Izzy was an unstoppable force. And Linda had children to take care of, to dress and get off to school. More than that, Linda knew that Isabel had to do this; there was no other choice for her. It was the curse of the writer, a feral hunger to understand and by understanding to control.

When Linda was just starting out as a photographer, she’d done a series she called “City Faces.” She’d walked around the city for weeks, just snapping pictures of people-some candid, some with permission-and wound up with a group of portraits that earned her an agent and her first major gallery show in SoHo. She’d asked her sister to write something for the brochure and they went through the photos together.

“Oh my God, Linda,” Izzy said. “Look at her. This is beautiful.” It was a black-and-white shot of an old woman she’d met at a bus stop. Her face was a road map of deep lines, her hair a brittle and unapologetic white, but her eyes were as wide and sharp as a child’s.

“Who was she? What was her story?” Izzy wanted to know.

Linda had been confused, even a little put off by the question.

“Who knows?” she said. “I didn’t talk to her. I just took her picture.”

For Linda, it wasn’t about the story behind the woman. It was about the beauty of that one moment, about capturing it and making it her own. It was about the universe that existed in a single frame. But that wasn’t enough for Isabel. She needed to know about the significant events that led the woman to sit at the bus stop at that precise moment, what she was thinking that put the expression on her face. And if she didn’t know, she’d have to make something up to satisfy herself.

They’d laughed about it, how different they were, how unalike were their individual arts and processes. In the end, Isabel wrote: “My face is what I give to the world. Look closely and you’ll see what the world has given to me.” Of course, it was perfect. Isabel was always pitch perfect whenever she put word to paper.

In Linda’s memory, they seemed very young that afternoon, so excited by Linda’s upcoming show, the publication of Izzy’s first novel right around the corner. They thought, as they always had really, that the world belonged to them. They’d never been called upon to think of themselves any other way. Even the grim tragedy that marked their late childhood hadn’t changed that idea very much.

Linda walked away from the window and stared at her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Wretched. She’d never been happy with her body (too small at the chest, too wide at the hips) but she’d always liked her face. She’d always been satisfied with her easy prettiness, good skin, well-formed features, shining blue eyes. Recently, though, deeper lines had started to make their debut around her eyes and mouth. Lack of sleep and too much stress were causing her to look haggard and worn out. Even her silky blond hair seemed drier, was losing some of that estrogenic glow. She put her hands to either side of her face and pulled the skin taut to simulate a bad face-lift and made herself laugh.

She’d never thought of herself as vain, but she supposed there were things she’d taken for granted about her looks. And now that those things were fading, she realized that she was very vain indeed. She noticed things about Izzy-her slim middle, the youthful fullness of her face, the smooth skin around her eyes-and it seemed to Linda that there was suddenly a big difference in the way they looked. They’d always been opposites in their coloring, Linda favoring their mother, Isabel their father. But they’d been equal in the timbre and volume of their beauty. Their father’s favorite proud refrain: “The Connelly sisters are lovely and smart.” There wasn’t a brighter one or a prettier one. Linda and Isabel had never felt the urge to compete with each other in those arenas.

Linda would not have believed that two kids and five years could make such a difference in her appearance. But then again, she’d never even thought about her age until recently. Lately, she’d realized that the softness at her belly would not be dissolved by exercise or no-carb torture. There was a sinking to her face that would not be improved without surgery or injections. But she’d always imagined herself as having too much character to succumb to surgical beauty treatments. She couldn’t see herself as one of those vain, awful women who cared more about the lines on their foreheads than about their children, who thought that looking young (not that they looked younger, exactly, just altered) meant a reprieve from the disappointment gnawing at the edges of their lives. How much energy that must take, to fight that losing battle. She was an artist; she’d age with character and grace.

Not that any of it mattered, not really. It was just one in a legion of dark little thoughts, mental gremlins, that could nip and gnaw at her sense of well-being if they were allowed.

Of course, there were bigger problems than her fading youth. How selfish was she to be thinking about such stupid things when Isabel’s life was falling apart? Linda broke away from her reflection, slipped back into bed, and pulled the heavy mass of blankets and comforter around her. She wanted to avoid the day for just a few more minutes, avoid her missing brother-in-law and the fact that her injured sister had just raced into the fray. Normally, she’d be frantic. But for some reason, she just felt drained by the whole matter, as though she’d awakened covered by a blanket of snow. A kind of emotional hypothermia had set in, stiffened her joints, robbed her of energy.

When she received the call yesterday and raced to the hospital, saw her sister pale and unmoving on the stretcher-that awful gash on her head-it felt as though she was living a terrible memory, as if it had all happened before. As afraid and shocked as she’d been before Izzy opened her eyes and started to speak, it was as though she’d been expecting some awful event relating to her sister’s husband all along.

There was something wrong with Marcus Raine; she’d known it from the day she’d first lain eyes upon him. He was worse through the lens, all hard angles and an odd shadow to his eyes. As a photographer, she knew to wait for that millisecond when the face revealed itself, a flicker of the eyes, an involuntary shifting of the muscles in the jaw or forehead. This was the second when pretty people were beautiful, or beautiful people ugly, or cheerful people suddenly haunted. A face is an organic entity; it can’t hold a protective posture forever. It must surface for air. She saw him clearly and early.

She’d tried to talk to Isabel but her sister wasn’t hearing it. Linda realized that she’d have to accept Marcus and hope she was wrong about him, or lose her sister. That’s what happened when the biological family rejects a spouse; a continental drift. If the marriage is successful, the incompatible units slowly move away from one another. Visits become less frequent until there is only the occasional phone call, the obligatory Sunday afternoon get-together, the infrequent, awkward dinner where so much goes unsaid. Linda could see how it would happen, had seen it before with her friends. Isabel was that in love with him. And so Linda, with an almost superhuman effort, bit her tongue and they all moved forward together. The irony was that, five years later, Linda was just starting to let her guard down about Marcus. Erik had always liked him, was beginning to convince her that she’d been mistaken. She was moving beyond just tolerance, even starting to like him a little. She should have known. The lens doesn’t lie.

She heard the high, light tone of her son’s voice and the low rumble of her husband’s. Then she heard the television go on. A minute later she smelled toaster waffles. The day was beginning without her. She felt a wave of gratitude that she had most of her Christmas shopping done. She’d wrapped all the gifts and driven them up to her mother’s in Riverdale last week. That’s where they’d spend Christmas Eve and open gifts on Christmas morning. Soon Brown was barking to go out and, through the wall, she heard Emily yelling at him to be quiet.

She’d gone into the guest room to check on her sister last night and found Emily and Brown piled around Izzy She marveled at the two of them, her daughter and her sister, how alike they were, how much she loved them, how the same fierce urge to protect them was a fire in her center. Tough talk, bad attitudes, strong opinions, steely expressions-all of it just hard armor to protect fatally delicate centers.

She heard her phone vibrate in the drawer by her bed and she quickly reached for it. The screen read: 1 Text Message. She flipped the phone open.

Can I see you today? I’m desperate. She felt a powerful wash of excitement and fear.

She answered: Family emergency. I don’t know. I’ll try.

At a light knock on the door, she slid the phone under the covers, closed her eyes.

“Mom?” said Emily, poking her face in. “I can’t find my black leggings.”

“Okay,” she said, fake groggy. “Coming.”

“Izzy’s gone,” said Emily. Her face was still but her eyes were bright with worry.

“Izzy will be okay,” Linda said, sitting up and opening her arms. Emily came to her quickly and let herself be embraced. “We’ll take care of her and she’ll be fine.”

“But what about Marcus?”

She released a sigh and considered lying, offering some platitude. But Emily was too old and too smart for that. Lies would just make her more afraid. She took her daughter’s face in her hands. Emily looked so much like Izzy that Linda felt as though she were speaking to both of them.

“The truth is, Em, we just don’t know what’s happening right now. The police are helping us and we’re going to figure everything out. Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together. That’s what a family does.”

Emily leaned against her, wrapped her arms around Linda’s middle.

“I think you and your brother should go to school today,” Linda said, rising. They moved together toward the door. “We’ll come get you if anything happens.”

Emily nodded uncertainly but seemed okay with it. Sending them to school would make things seem normal, which they needed. Trevor was going to bitch a blue streak; she knew he was already banking on a sick day. People generally considered her son to be the sweeter of the two children. But he was less malleable, less cooperative than his sister, more prone to defiance and tantrum.

“Your pants are folded on top of the dryer,” Linda said, patting Emily on her bottom. “Go get ready.”

She heard her phone buzz again under the covers, but Emily seemed not to notice as she loped from the room. “I want jelly on mine, Dad!” she called, exiting and shutting the door behind her. Brown started barking again.

Guilt, the river that runs through motherhood, threatened to rise over its banks. The day and all the misery it promised loomed like a thunderhead. She smelled the scent of coffee and figured there was no way out but through.

THE DAY MY father killed himself dawned blue and cold. I heard the hard wind rattling the windows and saw the bright sky and high cirrus clouds from my window as I woke. I looked across the room and saw my sister lying on the bed across from me. She stared up at the ceiling, her arms folded behind her head.

“I had a bad dream,” she said, knowing somehow that I was awake. She looked pale, small in her bed like the child she was.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Something terrible.”

“Dreams can’t hurt you,” I said, only because that’s what she always told me. And she only told me that because that’s what Mom told her. She was fifteen. I was ten. But there had been no dream, I’d learn later. She’d seen him. Linda had been the one to find my father as he lay slumped in the toolshed far behind our house, the wall sprayed with his blood, the gun lying on the floor. Somehow she was the only one to hear the blast.

It woke her from a deep sleep and she drifted out the back door to find him. He was always out there building things with wood-birdhouses, dollhouses, and tiny pieces of furniture, picture frames, curio cabinets. Everyone loved my father’s work. He was always making gifts for friends and neighbors, never accepting money. My mother complained about how he wasted his time with building trinkets when the lawn needed tending and the fence repair, that his hands were splintered and calloused, rough to the touch.

Linda pushed open the door and saw him there. A cigarette still burned in the ashtray. She was surprised, had never seen him smoke. She said it was as if the rest of the scene just didn’t register. All she could think about was that cigarette and how she just couldn’t imagine him putting it to his lips, drawing the smoke into his lungs. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there.

I often imagine her in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, the other on the doorknob. The bright full moon making her white nightgown translucent, the slim form of her body visible beneath it. She might have shivered in the cold, wrapped her arms around herself.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?”

I know he never meant for Linda or me to find him that way. We were forbidden from bothering him when he was in there. He would have expected our mother to come out raging in the morning about how he’d stayed out there all night again, and didn’t he remember he had a wife?

A fog fell over our lives. And it never lifted, not really. The contrast between our life before that day and after was so stark that it seemed like two different lives. Suicide marks you in a way that no other tragedy does-especially the suicide of a parent. And maybe the worst part about the suffering that follows is that no one ever discusses it. People feel angry when they think about suicide, the coward’s way out. As if all there is to life is the bravery to soldier on. There’s blame for the deceased who chose to throw away something to which other people desperately cling, and even for the family he left behind. Didn’t someone know how unhappy he was? And, of course, you have all those thoughts yourself, even and maybe especially as a child. The Connelly sisters are lovely and smart, my father always used to say. Just not lovely or smart enough, right, Daddy?

People step away from the topic, avert their eyes from you. I don’t remember being taunted at school. The other children just seemed repelled by me, kept distance between us. As a child, this has the effect of adding shame to the powerful brew of grief, rage, and sadness. There are no platitudes to offer those grieving a suicide. No one says, “He’s in a better place now” or “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” He wasn’t taken by accident or illness. He didn’t allow himself to be part of God’s plan. In the ultimate act of rebellion or surrender or just irreverence, he left.

I remembered a particular feeling I had in the year after my father’s death. It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

I had that feeling again standing in the apartment I shared with my husband. The doorman had tried to stop me, to warn me that something was terribly amiss. A uniformed police officer held me up at the elevator for a few minutes, arguing, blocking my passage with his body. And then Detective Crowe came to the door of my apartment. It was odd to see him there, inside, while I awaited entry in the corridor. Infuriating was a better word. I moved toward him quickly. But he lifted a hand, gave me a look that stopped me in my tracks-some combination of warning and compassion.

“You don’t want to be here, Mrs. Raine,” he said gently as I approached, the uniformed officer at my heels. “Not right now.”

“I need to be here right now, Detective.”

Something passed between us, a tacit understanding, and he moved away from the door frame, allowed me to enter the shambles of my life with a sweep of his hand.

8

He awoke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dark. But he could see by the sliver of light shining in between the edge of the blinds and the window frame that it was daylight. How long had he slept? Too long.

She shifted beside him.

“Relax,” she said. “It’s over. By tonight you’ll be gone.”

He didn’t answer her. It wasn’t over. The money had been transferred, the evidence destroyed, arrangements for his departure had been made. But it wasn’t close to being over. In the comfortable life he’d made, he’d forgotten what it was like to be afraid.

He looked over at Sara’s long, lean form, feeling the powerful arousal the sight of her body always awakened in him. But he didn’t reach for her. Instead he moved away, took his phone from the pocket of his pants, which lay in a heap on the floor, and moved quietly into the bathroom.

Her apartment was a hovel, filthy. She lived like a man, without a thought toward design or cleanliness. It was just a place she came to sleep, nothing but a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, all featuring a grime and neglect particular to their functions.

He opened the keyboard on his phone, started tapping with his thumbs:

I DON’T WANT YOU TO THINK I DIDN’T LOVE YOU BECAUSE I DID. REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU HAPPY FOR A WHILE, THAT WE WERE GREAT FRIENDS AND EXCELLENT LOVERS. AND THEN FORGET ME. MOURN ME LIKE I’M DEAD. 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.

It was a foolish thing to do, close to suicidal, and he was surprised at himself for even considering it. It would be far better for her to suspect that he was dead. But he knew her, knew the lengths she would go to prove herself right or to prove him wrong. The things she would risk, just to answer the most inane question. She’d walk the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, just to authenticate her writing. She’d go alone, just to feel the fear, to find the words to describe it. He realized that she wouldn’t be able to live with the ambiguity of his disappearance. And if she couldn’t, he couldn’t help her, wouldn’t be able to save her from herself.

“Do you ever lose control, Marcus? Have you ever just blown your stack?” Isabel wanted to know during a recent argument. “Don’t you want to know what it would be like to just let it rip?”

“No,” he told her with a smile. “It’s not fuel-efficient. An engine runs best warm, not hot.”

“And too cold, it seizes. It cracks.”

But he wasn’t as cold as she thought. It was just that her engine ran so white hot that everything else seemed frigid. Her temper, her passion, the heat of her desires, opinions, drives, that’s what drew him to her. She thawed him. His time with her had changed him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. He’d stayed with her far longer than he should have.

If he’d done what he set out to do and moved on, he wouldn’t be in the position he was in now, with more blood on his hands, forced to make changes in a hurry, enlist the help of people he’d hoped not to associate with again. He felt a simmer of regret and anger in his belly. He tamped it down; he’d need to ice over again, freeze like a still lake in winter, the summer of his time with Isabel just a memory.

His finger hovered a moment over the Send button, and then he pressed it. He felt a rush of emotion as he did so, sadness mingled with fear. Then he removed the battery and SIM card from the phone, flushed them down the toilet, and tossed the shell in the trash.

“What are you doing?” she called. “Come back to bed.”

He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. Two days without shaving and already the stubble on this face was nearly as thick as his goatee. He had dark half moons under his eyes, a drawn, gray look to him. Not forty-eight hours ago, he was making love to his wife in their beautiful home. He had a successful business. Because of mistakes he’d made, betrayals he’d invited, it was all gone. He would go back to being what he was before he knew Isabel. Nothing. He barely took comfort in the great wealth he had amassed in his time with her, some of it earned, some of it stolen. It didn’t bring him the satisfaction he’d imagined. In fact, he’d never felt more hollow, lower.

Sara called his name and he hated her. He didn’t blame her. Without her, he’d be dead right now. He would never have been able to accomplish what he had in the last forty-eight hours without her help. Everything he had worked for would have been lost. But he still hated what she represented.

They’d known each other since childhood. Her body was the first place in his grim adolescence where he’d found comfort in another. But the world had treated them differently, and they had taken different paths. He tried to escape the place they came from, to take more from life than they had been offered. She, like Ivan, succumbed.

What she was now, he didn’t quite know. She was vague about the details of her life since he’d left her in the Czech Republic to come to school in the U.S. He just knew that she was much changed. The vulnerability she’d had when he knew her was gone, replaced with a raw power-sexual and otherwise. He had needed her various skills, and she had helped, never asking for anything except his affection. The one thing he couldn’t give her.

She pushed the door open.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, moving behind him, wrapping her arms around his body. “I can take care of Camilla.”

“No. It’s my job to finish.”

He didn’t look at her or respond to her touch, and after a moment he felt her stiffen, then she left the bathroom.

“You’re weak when it comes to women,” she said, closing the door.

She was right about that. When he thought about Camilla and what she had done, how she’d wept when she confessed to him, he didn’t feel the kind of anger that he should have. He knew what he had to do. But he had no desire to do it.

She was waiting for him now, thinking he was about to make good on years of promises he’d never intended to keep. She was dead wrong.

When he left the bathroom, he saw that Sara had returned to bed. She was staring at him in the dim light. The sheet was pulled up to just below her perfect breasts. He felt heat in his groin, that magnetic pull from her body to his drawing him near. She didn’t smile; she rarely smiled. But she pulled him to her, wrapped her long legs around him. Her kiss was salty, urgent. Not sweet and yielding like Isabel’s. He was deep inside her, then, fast and hard. As he made love to her, he watched her face for that vulnerability to return when she was unguarded, had surrendered to pleasure. But it never did.

LINDA DIALED ISABEL, first at the apartment, then on her cell. Both calls went to voice mail but Linda didn’t bother to leave a message at either number. She knew when her sister was avoiding her; Izzy would call when she was ready and not before. So Linda sat, phone in her hand, debating about whether to call her mother, even though her sister had expressly asked her not to do so. Not until we’re sure what’s happening. There’s no need for her to worry. It’ll just add more tension.

Linda didn’t really want to call their mother, but still the temptation was strong, almost as though some dark motherly force compelled her to dial the number. She knew Margie was away, some spa trip with her friends, but she’d be reachable on her cell phone. A younger Linda would have called and then been angry at herself and her mother for doing the dance they always did. At some point, after becoming a mother herself, she realized that if you want to change the dance, all you have to do is sit down. So she rested the phone on the counter and walked away from it, went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. Brown watched her from the couch, where he had no business being.

“Off the couch, Brown.” He stepped off resentfully and flopped on the floor, issuing a deep sigh.

Linda and her mother had never really gotten along, not that they didn’t love each other. And it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Margie particularly; she had been an intelligent and caring mother, if not a particularly loving or affectionate one. Margie rarely raised her voice, had never struck the girls, was always there when she was needed-cupcakes for school, chaperone for field trips, help with homework. But the chemistry between Margie and her eldest daughter just wasn’t there. If they’d met on the street, they wouldn’t have chosen each other as friends. Linda’s mother claimed this was true from the womb. Though Linda was the good baby, the easy one, Margie asserted that Linda just never seemed to like her very much. How this could be true, Linda didn’t know. It seemed a ridiculous assertion, typically vain and narcissistic. Of course, none of that-whether they liked each other or not-really mattered, because Margie was her mother. And that relationship wasn’t designed for friendship necessarily; it didn’t need to be that to be successful. Even though they both had ugly memories of each other after the death of Linda’s father, they loved and accepted each other now; that was enough most of the time.

Erik had taken the kids to school and she was alone with Brown in the apartment. When the door closed and all their voices-usually raised, laughing or yelling or horsing around, but today quiet, muted, somber-faded with the closing of the elevator door, she released the breath she’d been holding. She always felt like that when they left, like her energy could expand and she could think. She wasn’t wife and mother, monitoring needs, cleaning faces, packing lunches, answering questions, reprimanding, instructing, nagging, kissing, hugging. She was just herself, free to pour a cup of coffee, maybe even go to the bathroom without someone calling after her. This was the space where she was most creative-in the aftermath. When she knew the kids were cared for and off to start their day, she could finally see the world with the clear vision she needed to do her work.

It wasn’t that motherhood made her less creative; it was just that it created a maze that she must navigate to get to that still, center space within her. And the twists and turns were guarded by hobgoblins-guilt and worry and sometimes just exhaustion-which could take her down and smother her. But somehow the gauntlet she had to run to find that energetic well made the time she spent there so much richer. It focused her attention, forced her to maximize every moment. She knew she was a better artist for the emotional wealth of her life, that she was richer for the depth and breadth of her love for her children. But a better life didn’t mean an easier one.

But she wouldn’t be working today. Today she needed to take care of Izzy help her through whatever was happening. And what if Marcus was gone for good? Well, she shouldn’t even think like that.

With the thought of her brother-in-law, she remembered Izzy’s description of the call she’d received, and started to feel a little flutter in her belly. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to leave her sister to it. What if the threat to her safety hadn’t passed? She decided to shower and go after her sister, whether Izzy wanted her around or not. She glanced at her cell phone, which rested on the bar. No messages. She was relieved and disappointed in equal measure. She didn’t have time for that particular mess.

She took her coffee into the bathroom and placed it on the marble countertop, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. She ran the water scalding hot so the bathroom filled with steam, was about to strip her pajamas and step in when the buzzer from the street door rang and Brown started barking.

Linda walked over to the intercom, expecting to see Erik and the kids on the small black-and-white screen, having forgotten homework or cell phone or lunch box, too lazy to come back up. But it wasn’t her family. She drew in a deep breath at the sight of the man who stood there, snapped up the phone from its cradle.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, peering up at the lens. “I watched them get on the train.”

She raced through calculations in her mind-twenty minutes to school, fifteen to get them settled and dropped off, a stop at the bank and the grocery store. Erik would be another hour and a half at least. He’d asked that she be there when he returned, had something he needed to discuss. She told him she needed to focus on Isabel and could it wait? No, he said. It couldn’t.

“You have to leave. Right now,” she said. Even in her anger, in her fear, there was a snaking pleasure, a guilty desire. She shot Brown a look and he stopped barking and walked away, went back to the couch. She didn’t bother reprimanding him.

“Please, Linda. I need to see you.”

She thought about having him up, making love to him hard and fast in the shower. She thought about releasing all her tension with an earthquake of an orgasm. But no, she wasn’t that low, that stupid.

“I’ll meet you,” she said. “There’s a coffee shop on the corner. Go there. Ten minutes.”

“Let me up,” he said, moving close to the lens. She could feel her whole body go hot.

“No,” she said. “You’re crazy.”

“I told you. I’m desperate.”

She leaned her head against the wall, fought the awful waves of temptation. The thought of him walking through the door, those hands roaming her body, his desperation like a rocket through her, made her weak and ashamed. How could she be having an affair, her of all people? The good girl, the woman with the perfect marriage, the perfect life. It was disgusting. She hated herself. But she couldn’t give him up.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Linda.”

“Go.”

He groaned and disappeared from the screen.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said, moving toward the shower. She tied her hair up so that it wouldn’t get wet, showered, and dressed quickly. She grabbed her coat and her bag and headed out the door. She’d stop and see him quickly, then go straight to Izzy’s. Erik would have to wait.

“Be a good boy,” she called to the dog who was fast asleep.

9

It felt oddly right that the apartment I shared with Marcus was in tatters. As I walked through the detritus of our life together-an oil painting we bought in Paris slashed and knocked to the floor, a crystal vase we’d received as a wedding gift in big jagged pieces, our bedding cut with scissors-I wasn’t outraged in the way one would expect. I recognized the poetry of it. We’d built a life, collected memories, had things to show for that journey. As I walked through the rooms crowded by my memories, somehow it seemed appropriate in this moment that those things should be in pieces. The air hummed with malice. It didn’t even seem like the place where I’d lived for the last five years of my life.

Detective Crowe was my shadow. He was kind enough to offer his silence as he followed me from room to room, but I could feel his energy-anxious, agitated by the million questions buzzing around his brain. Grit and bits of glass crunched beneath my feet as I made my way, lifting a photo of my sister, touching a spot of red nail polish someone had poured on the bathroom countertop. It had taken on the shape of a heart.

Finally, in the small office off our bedroom where I did most of my writing, I sank into the chair in front of my desk and stared at the large blank monitor. It was huge, like a wall. When I wrote, my words were giant, swimming in a bright white sea. It helped me to see them so large, as though they had more meaning, the power to keep my attention, my focus if it threatened to wander. The dark screen seemed like a hole I could fall into.

I had all my files backed up and stored at Jacks office; I wasn’t worried about lost work. That was the least of my worries, and it would be hours yet before I started thinking about personal files, journals, calendars, account numbers, e-mail correspondence. Just two days before I had been sitting in this chair, Googling myself on the Internet, answering fan e-mail, visiting the Web sites of other authors-doing everything but what I should have been doing, working on my pages. I was annoyed at myself then, frustrated by my lack of focus and productivity. Today it seemed like a state of bliss. I’d have paid any sum to be back there.

“Mrs. Raine, did your husband have a history of violence or mental illness?”

I swiveled around to see that a petite woman had followed us into the room, stood behind and to the left of Detective Crowe.

“My partner, Detective Jesamyn Breslow,” he said with a nod.

“No,” I answered her, surprised by the question. “You think my husband did this?”

She cocked her head at me. There was a pixyish look to her, the features of her face small and perfect-a lovely upturned nose and perfect valentine of a mouth, almond-shaped eyes. She was bright, electric, as if she might glow with the force of her own coiled energy if we turned off the lights. She had short, clean fingernails, wore her hair in a neat bob. Her clothes were good quality but I could see a shine to her black blazer from too many trips to the dry cleaner. Her microfiber wedges were a bit worn at the toe. The two cops seemed striking opposites: She was a saver, he was a spender. He was cool, slow, dark; she was white hot, action first, regrets later. And yet she seemed more centered, more mature.

“There’s so much rage evidenced here,” she said. “The way personal things have been destroyed, photographs defaced.”

“The kind of rage only a husband could manage for his wife?” I asked. Detective Breslow shrugged. I saw her eyes dart; she was thinking of something in her own life, went internal for a minute.

“Or vice versa,” Detective Crowe chimed in. I remembered his true confessions from the night before, the wife who left him, his bitterness.

“There is no one cooler than Marcus,” I found myself saying. My tone was harsh, even hostile. They both noticed it, exchanged a look. “He rarely raises his voice. Anger makes him silent-colder, harder. He’d never do anything like this. He wouldn’t have it in him. A waste of energy, not fuel-efficient.”

I said too much, realized it too late. Looking at both of them standing there, it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake giving them permission to access and search my apartment. I’d only been thinking of Marcus as a victim, someone who needed help. I had nothing to hide. It never occurred to me that he might.

Isabel, he’d say, drawing out my name into a gentle, paternal reprimand. Very foolish. These people aren’t here to help you. They’re here to help themselves.

“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow. Her tone was tactful, respectful, but just ever so slightly condescending. “If you know anything about what’s going on here, now would be the time to tell us.”

“My brother-in-law gave him money,” I said. “A lot of money they don’t have.”

Detective Crowe nodded. “Did you know anything about that? I mean before he disappeared.”

Disappear: to get lost without warning or explanation, to become invisible, cease to exist. It’s a common word; you’d use it for anything. My sunglasses disappeared. The hope of a sudden reappearance is connoted in that word. The way Detective Crowe used it, it sounded final, like a verdict.

“Erik just told me. My sister doesn’t even know.” I wasn’t really talking to them; I was thinking aloud, still in that stunned place where my inner world and outer world were confused with each other.

“Mrs. Raine, have you checked your bank accounts?”

The question sliced me, its edge so sharp it didn’t hurt at first. Then I felt the slow, radiating throb of dread. I moved closer to the monitor, hands poised over the keyboard, but then I stopped myself. The computer, of course, was gone. The dark screen was connected to nothing. I turned back to him.

“I have been with Marcus for six years, married for five,” I said. “What you’re implying with all your questions. It’s just not possible.”

“What do you think I’m implying?” Detective Crowe asked. He’d taken that stance again, the spreading of the legs, the folding of the arms. Detective Breslow lowered her eyes, then turned and left the room. They had a routine, roles they played. I could see that already.

“I’m asking the questions I need to ask,” he went on when I didn’t answer him. “If your answers are painting a disturbing picture, you need to think about that, Mrs. Raine.”

I looked away from him again and this time caught sight of my reflection in the monitor. I saw a woman who’d been badly beaten and looked the part. Behind me loomed Detective Crowe, a deep, worried frown etched on his face, as if he couldn’t quite figure me out. I wasn’t acting like he thought a woman in my position should act. He wanted me to be a victim, I think, weeping and afraid. He didn’t know me very well.

“I don’t know what you want from me-my husband is missing. My home-my head-in pieces.” Outside I heard the wail of a distant siren, the thunder of a garbage truck. “If you think I have something to do with all of this, you need to arrest me and let me call a lawyer. Otherwise, you have to give me a minute to think.”

“Okay,” he said, lifting a palm, his frown softening. “I hear you. But hear me. We often know more than we think we do. Something like this happens and it seems to come out of nowhere. But it never does. When something is not right in our life, we know, even if we choose not to see it.”

There was the lightest strain of piano music coming from the apartment above me. It seemed ghostly, almost eerie. Chopin. Marcus always hated Chopin-“Anemic, unsatisfying, depressing as hell,” he would say.

“Philosopher cop,” I said now.

That shade of a smile again, the lightest upturning of the corners of his mouth, as though everything he saw secretly amused him. But no, it wasn’t awful like that. I think he was just someone who saw the humor, the divine joke of it all. He’d rather laugh than cry. Anyway, he was right.

MY MOTHER REMARRIED more quickly than was seemly. “He’s not even cold in the ground,” I heard her sister whisper at the small wedding in our backyard. It was less than a year after my father’s death that my mother dressed in tasteful champagne-colored chiffon and married a man my sister and I had met only twice. There was a tiered cake with flowers, tea sandwiches, some kind of punch. Frowning faces broke into tight smiles when my mother and her groom approached. My sister was as grim and silent as she had been at my father’s funeral. My mother was, as ever, lovely with her strawberry-blond hair and alabaster skin; she was appropriate, not giddy, I wouldn’t say happy. She looked relieved more than anything. And I stood on the edges of it all, watching faces, absorbing swatches of conversations, listening to the nuances of tone.

Over a roast chicken, she’d told us a few months earlier.

“I’ll be marrying Fred. He’s a good man. He’ll provide for us, give us some stability.” She said it as if he was someone we knew, as if it was news we should have been expecting. We’d met him once when he came to pick her up for an evening. And once he’d had dinner at our house. Margie’s such a sensible woman. She always knows what to do. That’s what my father always said about her.

The news landed like a fist on the table, something inside me rattled hard. Neither Linda nor I said a word at first. We both stared at my mother and I remember her looking back and forth at each of our faces, almost defiant. My eyes drifted down to her lean, veined hands and saw that the wedding ring she’d always worn was gone. There was no mark on her finger. I wondered when she’d stopped wearing it. She cleared her throat in the silence, took a small bite of mashed potatoes, a swallow of water. My sister’s face was the same stoic mask it had been since the morning she found my father. I’d yet to see her shed a tear.

“I really have no choice, girls,” she went on when we said nothing. She smoothed out the napkin on her lap. “Your father has left us with nothing, and I’m afraid I’m without skills or experience. With what I could earn, we wouldn’t be able to keep this house. And I think we’ve lost enough.”

My sister pushed food around her plate and I remember the fork suddenly seemed very heavy in my hand. There was no sound but the clinking of silverware and the ticking of the large grandfather clock my father had loved. I looked over at the chair where he would have sat. He was the clown, my mother the straight man. He’d be cracking jokes, she reprimanding him with a smile, and sometimes a blush. He’d ask us about our days and really listen to our answers. My mother liked us to be dressed at dinner; there was no lounging in jeans, or eating in front of the television. We sat and ate together “like a nice family.” To say I missed my father would be like saying I was thirsty when all the water in the world had drained, leaving rivers and oceans dry, beds cracking in the heat of the sun. My mother saw me looking at his chair; something passed quicksilver across the features of her face, a flash of something angry or sad.

“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about your father,” she said then. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll better understand.”

“What things?” I said, finding my voice. The words sounded surprisingly sharp, loud and startling, like a hard and sudden rap on the door. How did I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, to ask ugly questions? No one had ever said as much to me. But my question was an uninvited guest in the room, greeted with stiff politeness, clearly unwelcome.

My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids, our father would say.

“It’s not important now, Isabel.”

“I want to know what you’re talking about,” I said firmly. “What didn’t you know?”

She shook her head, released a long breath, as if she regretted starting the conversation and now lacked the will to go on. Looking back, I realize she was very young to be a widow with two daughters, just two years older than I was the day Marcus disappeared. She’d married at nineteen, been pregnant by twenty. She was thirty-five when my father killed himself.

“I’m sorry, girls. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, sounding weak and tired. “Really, the only thing you need to know is that he loved you both. Very, very much. You were everything to him.”

She reached for our hands. I let her take mine. Linda snatched her hand away.

“Did you even love him?” my sister asked. All the color had drained from her face. My mother looked down at the table, tapped her outstretched hand on the wood, seemed to consider her answer.

“Marriage is not just about love. Only little girls believe that.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Her voice was thick, unlike her.

“He killed himself because he knew you didn’t love him anymore,” my sister said simply with a prim shake of her head. There was a frayed edge to her voice; her hands quavered. I felt anxiety building in my chest; it was expanding, threatening to bust me open wide.

“That’s not true, Linda,” my mother whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s just not true.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, strangely bright, her eyes wide. “And everybody knows it.”

My mother dropped her head to her arm and started to sob right there in front of us. My mother, who was a study in self-control-never speaking too loudly, never laughing too hard. Her makeup was always done; her clothes were always perfect. To see her sink like a rag doll and weep was shocking. I put my hand on her back and felt her heaving, touched the silk of her hair. I remember how golden it looked against the green cotton of her shirt. She was so real in that moment, so soft and full of life, so overcome by grief. It was terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. She was solid, was tied to the world by her pain. She couldn’t just drift away and be gone like him.

“You silly, selfish bitch,” Linda said. Rising from the table, she looked down at our mother, who released a deep sob at her words. Linda’s features glowed with a dark victory, a grimace of disgust and condescension pulled at her mouth. She was a sliver of a girl, thin and narrow as a pencil, but that night she was a titan in her rage and her sadness. Just months before, she’d loved Duran Duran and set the VCR to tape episodes of The Young and the Restless while we were at school. She’d slept with the same blanket she’d had since she was a baby. She’d giggled at all my stupid jokes and stories. That girl was gone, just her brittle shell remained. Then she left us there. I listened to her walk up the stairs, her pace measured and unhurried, and slam the door to our bedroom hard.

I sat rubbing my mother’s back. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.” It was all I could think to say.

“I did love him, Isabel,” my mother whispered. “I truly did. It just wasn’t enough for him.”

And, even at ten, when I didn’t understand the power of things like love and money and secrets between husbands and wives, I knew it was true. My father was a ghost who walked among us. He was a sweet, kind man, who always had a smile, who always said the right thing, who always gave the most extravagant gifts, who never failed to hug or stroke. But even as a child I sensed that he held the largest part of himself inside, that he was too far away to ever touch. He was like a bright-red helium balloon always just about to loft away-until he did.

BUT I WASN’T like my mother, turning away from signs, closing shadowed eyes against the things I didn’t want to see or know. I couldn’t be that. I’m the seer. The observer. Life is a liquid that sinks into my skin; I metabolize all the ingredients. I ask the questions, hear the answers, extrapolate meaning from the rhythm and nuance of language and tone. In our arguments, it used to come down to words. Marcus, not a native speaker, would throw up his hands, walk away, so angry that I could get hung up on the semantics, the connotations of the words he used, ignoring, he claimed, his true meaning, the argument itself. But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel

“You use language like a weapon, like a sword, Isabel,” he said one time. “Am I your opponent? Will you cut me because I can’t wield it as well as you?”

“And you use it like a blunt-force instrument-imprecise, clumsy, banging, banging, banging to get your point across. You’d use a jack-hammer for needlework.”

“WHAT ABOUT THE affair you mentioned?” Detective Crowe charging into my reverie, bringing me back to present tense. I don’t know how much time had passed since he last spoke.

“What about it?”

I heard him sigh, as though I was being obtuse in order to exasperate him. “How did you find out about it? Did you know her name, where she lived?”

“I just knew,” I told him. “I felt it. Then there was a text message. I asked him to end it; he said he would. I never knew anything about her.”

He tugged at the cuff of his shirt, straightening the line that was exposed beyond his jacket, frowning.

“You don’t seem like the type not to ask questions.”

Maybe I was more like my mother than I wanted to admit, about some things, anyway. But it was different. I didn’t want to know anything about Marc’s lover at the time, didn’t want any fodder for my imagination to spin. Without it, I could just cast her as a bit player, someone who glided across the stage barely noticed. Any detail might have started me weaving her into something bigger, more important than I wanted her to be.

“He met her in Philadelphia. That’s all I know.”

“And even that might have been a lie.”

I shrugged, gave an assenting nod.

“That’s what really got me, you know? About my wife? I think I could have gotten over the cheating part. It was all the lying, all the sneaking around that really irked me. You can almost understand infidelity, right? The whole lust thing-it’s there. But it’s the logistics that make it really ugly, unforgivable. You thought she was spending time with her mother, but she was with her boyfriend. It turns your stomach.”

I didn’t answer because I knew what he was doing. He was trying to make me angry, relate to me and get me talking, commiserating. I’d watched enough television to know this. I’d start talking and some “clue” would pop out of my mouth, or I’d say something I hadn’t intended to, give away something that I knew. Maybe even admit that I’d killed my husband, dumped his body in the East River, killed his colleagues and trashed his business and the home we shared.

“But you forgave him, huh? Stayed with him?”

“Yes.” Was it really true? Had I ever forgiven him?

“Why?” He almost spat the question. What he really wanted to ask was “How?”

I regarded him. Another natty outfit-brown wool slacks, with a dark brown leather belt and shoes, cream button-down, dark coat, black hair gelled back, the debut of purposeful stubble. His intelligence, his competence, was a thin veneer over a deep immaturity. He was a boy, a child, though it looked as though forty was right around the corner. He still believed in fairy tales.

“Because I love him, Detective.”

“And love forgives.” He sounded sarcastic, bitter.

“Love accepts, moves forward. Maybe forgiveness comes in time.”

The answer seemed to startle the smugness off his face; the inside points of his eyebrows turned up quickly and then returned to their place in the arch. Sadness.

He recovered quickly. “What do you think they were looking for here, Mrs. Raine? At first glance, what’s missing other than the computers and the files in that cabinet?”

He exhausted me with all his questions, his attitude, and the way he kept saying my name. All the drive and energy I’d had in the cab had drained from me. I felt as if I’d been filled up with sand. “I don’t know.”

I looked at my naked hand. He caught the glance. “Where’s your wedding ring?”

“It’s gone,” I answered. “My brother-in-law said it was gone when they came to the hospital.”

It meant something; we both knew that. Neither of us knew what. He wrote it down in his book. He asked a few questions about the ring, scribbled my answers. There wasn’t much to tell-a two-carat cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was the only material possession in the world that held any value for me.

The phone in my pocket vibrated and I withdrew it and looked at the screen. I flipped it open to read the text message there, then snapped it shut.

“Who was that?” asked Detective Crowe. A little rude, I thought, and none of his business.

“My sister’s worried,” I told him. He nodded as if he knew all about worried sisters. I felt my chest start to swell, my shoulders tense.

“You’re looking a little pale again,” he said after a beat.

I stood and moved toward the door. “You know what? You were right. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to be here. I have to leave.”

He blocked my passage with his body, which I did not like. I took a step back.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said, mellow but firm. “Since you insisted on being here, we might as well do it now.”

“I know. But I’d rather do it someplace else,” I said. “You said yourself I shouldn’t be here, and you were right. Anyway, you must have enough to keep you busy here for a while-fingerprints, DNA, whatever.”

“That’s for the techs, the forensics teams. They’ve come and gone. While they analyze what they’ve found, all I have to do is ask questions. Hopefully the right ones lead to answers that help me to understand why three people are dead, your home and office have been trashed, and your husband, Marcus Raine, the point at which all of this connects, is missing.”

He leaned on the name heavily, oddly.

“Why did you say his name like that?” I asked.

He raised a finger in the air. “Now, that’s a good question.”

His doppelgänger had returned, the shadow my addled brain was creating behind him. I felt some kind of dizzying combination of anger, dread, and dislike for the man who was crowding me in my very small office with his thick body. I took another step back and was against the wall.

“Marcus Raine, born in the Czech Republic in 1968, emigrated to the U.S. in 1990, attended Columbia University on scholarship and obtained a bachelor’s and then a master’s in computer science from that institution. Lived in the U.S. first on a student, then a work visa, before he became a U.S. citizen in 1997.”

“That’s right.” With the exception of the last piece of information, I’d told him as much last night. He wasn’t wowing me with his detective skills.

“Worked for a start-up called Red Gravity, made a small fortune when the company went public in 1998.”

I nodded. It wasn’t enough money to retire forever. But it was more money than Marcus ever thought he’d make in his lifetime-or so it had seemed at the time.

“He did well enough to set up his own company shortly after we were married,” I said.

He offered a mirthless smile. “Well, no. That’s the thing.”

I didn’t appreciate the know-it-all, smarter-than-you swagger to his bearing; it caused me to flush with the shame of a liar or a fool. I tried to push past him again. The room was suddenly too hot. He waited a second before yielding to me. I didn’t go far, just to my bed, where I sat heavily, though the sheets and comforter had been shredded. It looked as though someone very strong had sunk a knife deep into the mattress and then cut ugly swaths through the material. There’s so much rage evidenced here. Was it possible that Marcus and I had made love here just the morning before last?

“Marcus Raine,” he said, following me and pulling a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket, “disappeared in early 1999.”

He handed me the paper, a printout from the Times online. When he did, I noticed that the skin on his knuckles was split, his hand swollen and looking sore. I almost asked about it but figured I had my own problems.

With a vein throbbing in my throat, I read a small news item about a young man, a successful software engineer, and his sudden disappearance. It told of how his parents were killed and he was raised by his aunt in a town just outside of Prague during communism, how he came to the U.S. and made good, realized every immigrant’s dream of America. And just as the rags-to-riches tale came to its happy ending-he’d met a girl and fallen in love, had asked her to marry him-Marcus Raine disappeared. Didn’t come to work one day. When his girlfriend reported him missing, police gained entry into his apartment. There was no sign of a struggle. Some items-keys, wallet, a watch he wore every day-were missing. The article confirmed what I had learned about missing men: No one waged much of an effort to find them. No one heard from him again. His whereabouts were still unknown.

I looked up at the detective. I don’t know what he expected to see on my face, but I could tell by the way his eyes went soft that he felt sorry for me suddenly.

“Someone else with the same name,” I said weakly.

“And the same life story,” he said. “Possible. But how likely?”

I found myself looking at his shoes. I could tell they were expensive. From the leather and stitching, I’d say Italian. He couldn’t afford shoes like that; I figured he was in debt, maybe a lot of debt. My brain switched off like this when I didn’t want to deal with what was in front of me.

“Isabel.”

I looked up at him. He held out a photograph, and I took it from him.

“Do you know this man?” asked Detective Crowe.

For a second, I thought I was looking at a picture of my husband. But no, this man was narrower at the shoulders, the features of his face weaker, eyes hazel, not haunting blue. Really, as I looked closely, he was nothing like Marc except for his coloring, his nearly shaved head and blond goatee.

“That’s Marcus Raine, born June 9, 1968, disappeared January 2, 1999.”

Same name, same life story, same birthday as my husband-but not my husband.

I guessed the photograph was taken on the observation deck of the Empire State Building; the city lay tiny and spread out behind him. This strange man with my husband’s name had his arm draped around a pretty blonde. They both wore stiff tourist smiles.

“Do you know him, Isabel?”

Was there something vaguely familiar about him? It seemed as if I could have seen him before, somewhere, though I couldn’t have said when or where. I’d never met anyone from Marc’s life before me, not family, friends, or even colleagues.

“There’s a resemblance, wouldn’t you say?” said Crowe.

“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to give Detective Crowe anything. “Maybe.”

“What about the girl, Camilla Novak?”

The girl in the photo had that kind of hard-featured, lean beauty that seemed to characterize Czech women. I remembered noticing in Prague how gorgeous they all were in the way of gems or metals, stunning but not inviting. She had that same aura to her-Look, don’t touch. I didn’t recognize her, but something about her name rang familiar. Had I seen it or heard it somewhere? I couldn’t remember.

“No. I don’t know either of them.”

I had a thought that caused me to get up quickly. Too quickly; I almost sank to my knees but Detective Crowe steadied me with a hand to my elbow.

“Take it easy,” he said, leading me back to the bed. “What is it?”

“There was a small photo album, really a canvas-bound book with old photographs, letters, and recipes from his mother. He kept it in the back of his closet.”

“I’ll get it. Where is it?”

I pointed to the closet, battling a terrible nausea and dizziness. When he opened the door, I saw that all Marc’s designer clothes remained untouched, arranged by color, meticulously maintained. Suits and collared shirts were hung, sweaters and knits were folded. It was an oasis of order in the chaos. It felt like an insult. But, of course, the album and all the personal items within were gone. Detective Crowe turned to show me his palms.

“There’s nothing here.”

I felt a rush of sadness and fear. That album, with its worn edges and yellowed pages coming loose from their binding, was the only piece of the past Marcus had, he claimed-a couple of grainy black-and-white pictures of himself as a child, a picture of the parents I’d never meet, recipes in a woman’s pretty handwriting. There were letters in Czech from his aunt. I used to look at these things when he wasn’t home, when we were fighting. It comforted me to know that he was a boy once, fragile, vulnerable, that there were reasons he seemed so closed off now. Was it a fabrication? I wondered now. Were those pictures of someone else?

“Seems Marcus Raine was a bit of a loner-no family, no friends really, other than the girl,” said Detective Crowe. “One of those guys, I guess. Even his former colleagues at Red Gravity said he kept to himself, didn’t party after work or go to lunch with anyone. He worked hard but didn’t socialize. According to the notes in the file.”

“What are you getting at, Detective Crowe?” I asked.

“Before I answer you, let me ask you a question.” He went on without waiting for a response from me. “Last night you told me that you didn’t know anything about his business, didn’t have much to do with it at all.”

“That’s right.”

“Then why is everything in your name? Why was your Social Security number used to establish the EIN?” Another bomb dropping, another structure crumbling like powder.

“It wasn’t.”

“But it was.”

We held each other’s eyes, both of us disbelieving, both of us watchful. I saw Detective Breslow come stand in the doorway to my bedroom. I think she’d been standing just outside the whole time. I broke Crowe’s gaze to look at her.

“We think he used your information to avoid using his own, Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow.

A thin, dark film started to stain the lens of my memory. Our meeting, our passionate courtship, how quickly we married. How he waited until we returned from our honeymoon-three weeks in Italy-before he devoted himself full-time to starting up Razor Technologies. So many new beginnings; it was thrilling. When he told me that he hoped I’d be part of the business, a partner, I was touched that he wanted to share that with me. I signed a flurry of documents without really looking twice.

He insisted we change accountants, use someone who knew about his industry. I fired a man I’d worked with most of my career and let Marcus take over everything with the help of a firm with which I wasn’t familiar. I signed papers quarterly and at year end for both the company and my own earnings.

When was the last time I’d looked at any of it, really perused it? Numbers frightened me, literally shut me down. I was happy someone else took it all over. My accountant left multiple messages: “Isabel, you must return my call. We need to talk about this new firm you’ve hired.” I’m ashamed to say I ignored the voice mails, never gave him the courtesy of answering.

Dread was coming on like a bad flu. I thought of Linda. She’d done the same with Erik, put her signature where her husband asked. Two smart women who knew better, who should have learned early, the hard way, not to surrender our power, our financial security to any man. Detective Crowe was still talking.

“It’s easy enough to walk around with someone else’s name and résumé, especially if he had all the documents, the driver’s license, the green card,” Breslow went on. “They look alike enough that he-whoever he is or was-could just become Marcus Raine, especially if neither of them had any real ties.”

Breslow cut in. “The afternoon of January 2, 1999, Marcus Raine, or someone posing as him with all the necessary documentation, cashed out his accounts,” she said, handing me another photograph.

A man in a blue baseball cap, jeans, and a sweatshirt stood at a bank teller’s window. His face was partially obscured by the brim. It could have been Marcus, true. But it could have been anyone with his build and coloring.

“This is crazy,” I said, finally finding my voice and some reserve of physical strength. I stood and faced both detectives. “You can’t just slip into someone’s identity, become that person, use his history as your own. Eventually someone would have discovered he wasn’t who he said he was.”

“Maybe someone did discover it,” said Crowe. “Maybe that’s what this is all about. He needed to disappear again. Everything that might have been used to identify him is”-he swept his arm-“all gone.”

“His fingerprints are all over the place-here, at the office,” I said. “DNA-everywhere.”

“That only helps us to identify him if he’s in one of the systems already,” Breslow said patiently, as if she’d responded to this statement a hundred times before. “And we won’t know that until the fingerprints and DNA we found here are processed and put through IAFIS and CODIS, the national databases that store this type of data. It could take a while-maybe a week for a priority case, between processing and getting the information to the FBI, waiting for them to respond. And if he hasn’t been arrested and processed for anything else in the U.S., or if his DNA doesn’t show up on another unsolved-case file, we’ll have nothing.”

I sank back down on the bed. I felt him slipping away, this man I loved and lived with for five years. I remembered him stepping into that elevator, calling, “I love you, Izzy” as it took him away. I thought that’s what he said; I assumed it was. But maybe that’s not what I heard at all. I relived that horrible screaming again, feeling a cold finger trace the back of my neck, raising the hair there.

“No,” I said. “No. This is not right. You’re making some kind of mistake here.” It wasn’t possible, was it? That the man I married was someone else entirely than I believed him to be?

Detective Crowe was leaning against the wall, staring at me hard. “He needed your Social Security number to start his business. The name Marcus Raine doesn’t appear anywhere on the corporation documents. He’s not even an employee of the company. Everything’s in your name. Yours and Rick Marino’s.”

I didn’t even know what to say. I just sat there mute, reeling.

“Do you know what Social he used to apply for your marriage license?” asked Breslow. Her tone was gentle, empathetic. I glanced over at her and saw compassion on her face; she was a woman who’d been lied to, knew how it felt. It hadn’t made her bitter, like it had with Crowe. It had made her smarter.

Our files were all gone; they knew that. “I have no idea.”

She handed me three more pieces of paper. A copy of Marcus Raine’s green card with his picture, a copy of his Social Security card, and a copy of our marriage license.

“That’s Marcus Raine,” she said. She came to stand beside me, pointed a finger at the stranger’s picture. Then she tapped the copy of the Social Security card, then the marriage license. The numbers were the same.

Crowe picked up a picture of Marc from my desk. “This is not the same man.”

We were all quiet, my mind racing through options, possibilities, ways this might all be a mistake.

“So you’re saying that he stole another man’s identity, used his Social Security number to marry me, then used my name and Social to establish a corporation for Razor Technologies.”

I couldn’t believe I was still speaking. I was shredded like the mattress I was sitting on, little pieces of me drifting into the air and floating away.

Breslow nodded. “It looks that way to us at the moment.”

“Then what happened to this man?” I asked, holding up the copy of the green card.

“That’s another very good question,” said Crowe.

I thought I should rail in defense of my husband, the real Marcus Raine, rant about what a terrible mistake they were making, threaten to sue, do something other than sit there and stare at the wall. But I couldn’t.

“So, Mrs. Raine, any thoughts on who you might have married?”

I had the oddest sensation, sitting in my ruined bedroom faced with two detectives who knew more about my husband than I did. It was as if my train had reached its final destination, except when I stepped out onto the platform, I was in a place I hadn’t intended to visit and couldn’t name, but one that was vaguely familiar just the same.

My phone vibrated in my pocket again. I flipped it open and read the text message there, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach. I tried to keep my expression neutral but my cheeks warmed.

“Your sister again?” Crowe asked. I couldn’t tell if there was suspicion in his tone. I nodded but couldn’t find my voice, shoved the phone back in my pocket, walked over to the window.

“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow, “I strongly suggest you check your bank accounts.” Her tone implied that she already knew what I’d find.

SHE LET HIM take her against the heavy porcelain sink in the unisex bathroom. She clung to his wide back in what she knew he thought was passion. Really she was just afraid that their weight was going to pull the sink, cold and painful beneath her buttocks with each deep thrust, from the wall. She felt his passion, his desperation. And even if she didn’t share it necessarily, it felt so good to be wanted like this. Wanted by someone who hadn’t watched her give birth, who didn’t shave while she peed, who hadn’t seen her sick in bed with the flu. With him, she was a mistress, still a mystery, something not quite possessed.

“I love you,” he whispered, his voice tight, his eyes closed in pleasure. “I’m sorry, I do.”

She’d asked him not to say it. She didn’t feel obliged to answer. She found herself watching his face, thinking, No, I don’t love you. And as she succumbed to an earthquake of an orgasm, she buried her face in his shoulder to keep herself from crying out, I don’t love you. I love my husband. Strange as it was to be thinking this as he shuddered and moaned with pleasure. “Oh, God.” He let his weight press against her. She felt his chest heaving and she clung to him.

She was someone else with Ben, not a mother, not a wife, not someone defined by her relationships with other people. She was an artist, an unencumbered heroine in a story that took place in her imagination.

“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling up his pants and glancing at the door they’d locked behind them. She always hated these moments when the pleasure had passed and they hastily pulled on their clothes. The groping and ripping off of garments was always exciting. The aftermath was just cheap. A grimy happy holidays sign hanging on the back of the door just made it worse.

She turned away from him, lifting her panties over her hips and letting her skirt fall. She looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look so bad after all, did she? Maybe it was the lighting.

“You can’t do this,” she said lamely. “Turn up at my apartment like that. We both have families.”

“I know,” he said, looking ashamed and miserable. “I know.”

She didn’t feel guilty yet. That would come later when he was gone, when the kids came home, or when she was laughing with her husband. Now she just felt sated, or rather as if something that pained her had been salved.

“I have to go,” she said, moving to him, resting against him.

“What’s going on?” He put a gentle hand on her arm, looked at her with concern. “A family emergency, you said.”

She hated when he did this, acted like their relationship was real, not some asinine mistake they were both making. He always wanted to chat and cuddle, or talk about his feelings like some teenage girl. Didn’t he understand? She just wanted to forget about herself for five minutes. When they first started seeing each other, what thrilled her the most was that her worries about the kids, money, her career, disappeared during these little romps. If the relationship evolved, all those worries would just carry over into this new place. The euphoria, the blessed escape of it would disappear; it would become just another thing to worry about. And that she couldn’t manage.

She told him quickly about Marcus and her sister, tried not to be curt or dismissive. Someone knocked on the restroom door; it was the only one in the back of the small coffee shop. Outside, she heard the clinking of silverware, the mutter of conversation. The aroma of bacon and maple syrup made her remember she’d skipped breakfast.

“I’ll be just a minute,” she called. There was no answer.

“What do you think happened to him?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket and glancing at it, looking for messages.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” he offered. “I know the crime-beat reporter pretty well.”

She’d met Ben at a gallery opening for her work. He was an art critic who’d been less than kind to her in an earlier review. Common, maudlin, were the words that stuck in her mind. But still, she found herself drawn to him. He was a tall, powerful man with close-cropped dark hair and a neat goatee, a small silver hoop in each ear. From the nastiness of his written comments and his striking appearance, she expected him to be verbose, loud or overbearing. Instead she found him soft-spoken, carrying an aura of vulnerability. She found herself watching his face, for that moment when he thought no one was looking, when the muscles shifted and relaxed, revealing the true man. It never came. He was guarded, always.

“Seems like it’s always the people who do the least with their lives who have the nastiest things to say about those who do the most,” she’d said to him the night of their meeting, having had a bit too much to drink. The circle of people standing around them went silent, but she could feel Erik smiling beside her. He liked it when she got feisty.

Ben gave her a slow nod, took a sip of wine. “I’m sure it must seem that way. But how do you feel about all those critics who have nice things to say? Do you hold them in such disdain?”

She had to laugh. It came out deep and throaty and she saw his eyes shine at the sound of it.

“Of course not,” she answered. “Those critics are obviously brilliant.” And everyone joined in their laughter, relieved that the tension had dissipated.

“I love your work, Linda,” he said, and she saw a flash of arrogance. The way he talked to her in that group, the way he said her name as if they were old friends-it gave her a strange charge. “I hold you to a very high standard. That’s why I’m so disappointed when your work doesn’t meet your abilities. Which, admittedly, isn’t often.”

He raised a glass to her and the others in their group did the same. She could have been gracious here, but she wasn’t.

“So, are you a failed photographer, like so many critics? Do you have stacks of photographs somewhere that no magazine would buy, no agent would represent?”

Linda felt Erik give her a little warning squeeze on her lower back; they both knew wine changed her personality a bit, made her more aggressive, prone to saying things she never would sober. She held Ben’s eyes, enjoying the slow smile that spread across his face.

“No,” he said. “Even as a child my only ambition was to stand in judgment of artistic achievement.”

The group let out a roar of laughter that caused everyone else in the gallery to look at them.

Linda and Ben were fucking within the week.

“That would be great,” she said, moving into him, wrapping her arms around his middle. He was much bigger than Erik, broader through the shoulders, fuller in the middle. She liked this about him, his size. It made her feel safe, even though there was nothing safe about him or anything they did.

“I’ll text you,” he said into her hair.

She broke away from him and unlocked the door, peered out and didn’t see anyone waiting in the slim hallway leading back to the restaurant dining area. She cast him a backward glance and saw a sad look of longing on his face that made her heart catch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know why.

“Me, too,” he said.

The difference between them was that he wasn’t happy in his marriage. Love had left his relationship long ago. He told her that he stayed with his wife because of their two daughters, ages six and eight. She’d seen pictures of them, both sweet faced, one dark, one light, just like her and Isabel. The sight of them made her feel such acute shame that she had to force herself not to look away when he trotted out whatever new photographs he had with him. She couldn’t imagine bringing pictures of her kids to these meetings, couldn’t understand why he did that.

Linda didn’t know which of them was guiltier in this affair, though she was fairly certain she was doing the most harm. Here she was, someone blessed with love and success and still unsatisfied. As she walked through the restaurant, no one noticed her-none of the diners, not the waitress at the busy counter or the cook over the grill. She loved the anonymity of New York City. You were always alone; no one cared what you did, what you wore, with whom you were sleeping. Everyone was so wrapped up in the dream of their own lives and what they wanted to be that they never saw you at all.

She called her sister again from the cab heading uptown. No answer.

10

I did as Detective Breslow suggested, starting checking my accounts. At the accountant’s office, there was no answer and no voice mail, though business hours were well under way. Not a good sign. With our computers gone, my normal way of checking accounts and credit cards was out of the question. So Detective Crowe and I walked down to the ATM on Broadway. It didn’t take long to confirm their suspicions; all our accounts had been reduced to a hundred dollars. I stared at the glowing numbers on the small screen and felt a burning in my chest, as if bile was coming up from my empty stomach. Four accounts-a checking, a savings, and two money markets-all empty except for a hundred dollars each, the minimum required to keep the accounts opened.

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said Detective Crowe, scribbling in his little book.

“Hey, are you done?” Some guy waiting impatiently behind us, shifting from foot to foot, gripping a cell phone in his hand. “You’re holding up the line.”

We moved from the queue and I ducked into a doorway, just so that I could lean against something, get out of the sidewalk crowd. People hurried past; the traffic on Broadway was a river of noise.

“How much are we talking about here?”

“Those are just the liquid accounts,” I said. The concrete beneath my feet felt like sand, shifting and unstable. “I don’t know, maybe around seventy thousand between the four of them?”

He nodded, not offering judgment, just writing, always writing in that stupid little book. I wanted to say something, but inside I was in a free fall, wondering about everything it had taken me so long to earn and grow. I wondered about the investment accounts-the IRAs, the pensions, the stocks. Of course, they would all be gone, too. The weight of it was starting to hit me; everything was gone. A hollow space was opening in my middle and I thought of my mother again.

MARGIE HAS THESE perfect long fingers, always bejeweled unapologetically with all manner of chunky gems.

“An old woman should wear jewels, big ones,” she says. “She’s earned them and they distract from her fading looks. I may not be young anymore, but at least I’m rich. And that’s something.”

That’s Margie.

Except for the night she told us that she planned to marry Fred, I have never seen her lose herself-not in happiness, not in grief. She would smile but never indulge in a belly laugh. She would frown but never yell. As a younger woman, it was hard for me to imagine her as a girl buffeted by the same passions, desires, and ambitions that rocketed me through my education and career. I couldn’t imagine her lost in passion or crushed by disappointment. She seemed as stoic and steady as a stone column. This was a comfort in some ways, because she was always a place to moor in rough weather.

Years after I left home, after I’d graduated NYU and made my first real money, my mother told me about the months after my father’s death, about the staggering debt of which she’d been ignorant, the gambling addiction that drained him of everything he owned, including his will to live. It only took a week for her to discover that our home was about to go into foreclosure, our vehicles about to be repossessed, that everything she thought she owned, down to the new range, belonged to a bank that hadn’t been paid in months.

In the throes of grief for her husband, she was forced to face the reality that during their marriage he had lied about everything, spent all their money and beyond, and then abandoned us to live with his deceptions and mistakes. We were weeks from being homeless.

“I felt as though I’d swallowed drain cleaner,” she told me. “Everything inside me burned. I’ll never forget those nights, how I worried. How angry I was at your father, at myself for being so ignorant and weak. I had nowhere to turn. No one in our family had the kind of money I needed in order to save us. But then, of course, there was Fred.”

He’d loved her for years, she said, respectfully, from a distance. They’d met at church, where my mother had always gone alone on Sunday mornings. He was a wealthy man, came from money, inherited several very successful grocery stores, then made a fortune selling out to one of the big chains, made wise investments. He paid off all the debt my father left behind, the mortgage on our house.

“I don’t know what would have happened to us if it weren’t for Fred.”

“But did you love him, Mom?”

A pause, a sip of coffee where a monolithic emerald glinted in the sunlight. We watched Fred from the window as he filled a birdhouse with seed in their expansive backyard. Their Riverdale home was palatial; I’ve never heard them fight.

“I learned to love him. He’s a good man,” she said finally. “Anyway, it’s overrated, romantic love. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.”

I remember them holding hands while Fred drove us all in the Mercedes to the city for lunch and museums, plays. He was always kind to us. But he was not my father. For years I neither loved him nor disliked him. We did, however, form a friendship over time, a kind of mutual tenderness and respect that was somehow forged by our love for Margie.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Sitting there with her, I suddenly, vividly remembered that night when she told us she planned to marry Fred. These were the things she wouldn’t share then.

“Because you’re a grown woman, just starting out in your life. I want you to know things no one ever taught me.”

She got up and walked to the coffeepot on the counter, warmed her cup and carried the pot back to the table and refilled my mug, too. She was still beautiful; the years hadn’t robbed her of that, though she claimed they had. She complained about her neck, the skin under her eyes. But she was too afraid to go under the knife for vanity. Her words. “It’s like asking God to punish you for your silliness and then laying yourself out on a table for His ease.” She was more regal, more powerful than I remembered her when I was growing up.

“Money is power, Isabel,” she said, looking at something above and beyond me. “It’s freedom. It’s choice. No, it won’t buy you happiness. But it will buy you everything else. Unhappiness is a lot easier to bare when you have money.”

“Mom,” I said. She held up a hand.

“In my love for your father, I turned everything over to him. I never wrote a check in all the years of our marriage. I didn’t even know how much money he made. It seems foolish now, but I suppose I was a foolish girl who went from my father’s house to my husband’s house. I never learned to take care of myself.”

“You took care of us. Not everyone can do that.”

She nodded. “I knew how to do those things-bake cookies and bandage knees, listen to worries and sew up dolls. But this is something more important. Something I have to tell you because I couldn’t show you.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I have my own money,” I said. She reached for my hand and gripped it hard.

“That’s good. But hear this. When you find the right man and fall in love, Izzy give yourself heart and soul, if you must. But don’t ever give him your money.”

She was watching me urgently, the same way she had when she told me never to get in a stranger’s car or never to get behind the wheel if I’d been drinking, the dire consequences of those actions having already played out in her mind. I found myself growing annoyed, uncomfortable. I wasn’t the same kind of woman she was; I didn’t need a man to take care of me.

“Okay, Mom, okay,” I said, drawing my hand back from hers. “I get it.”

STANDING ON THE street with Detective Crowe, I felt the first dawning of a terrible anger. Around me, lampposts were wrapped with green garland, people were carrying festive bags packed with gifts, and an electronics store was blaring “Jingle Bells” from outdoor speakers. I barely registered any of it. The depth and breadth of my husband’s betrayal was opening a chasm to reveal a dark abyss. I found myself ticking back through the years of our marriage and realized that there had been signs for me to see, places where I might have asked questions but didn’t. I had to ask myself now: Had I written the story of my marriage to Marcus, unwilling, unable to see the man I’d cast in the vital role of husband? I found myself backing away from the detective, panic fluttering in my chest like a cage of birds.

“Where are you going, Isabel?” he asked, his voice wary, a warning.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, lifting my arm to the traffic. A yellow cab pulled over immediately.

The detective didn’t move to stop me, though he looked as if he wanted to. I saw his arm lift and then drop back to his side. He seemed still, careful, trying not to frighten a butterfly he wanted to net.

“Stay in touch with me,” he warned. “Don’t make me think I have to worry about your role in this.”

I turned and grabbed the door handle and got into the cab quickly. I saw the detective shaking his head-in confusion, in disapproval, I couldn’t be sure-as the taxi pulled into traffic. He put a hand to his jaw, his eyes still locked on the disappearing vehicle.

“Where to?” asked the cabbie. I could see only the back of his bald head; in his picture on the dash he looked like the Crusher.

“I’m not sure yet. Just drive north.”

Only now, alone, in the quiet of the cab, did I allow myself to look again at the text message on my phone. The second one was not from Linda, but from Marcus.

I DON’T WANT YOU TO THINK I DIDN’T LOVE YOU BECAUSE I DID. REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU HAPPY FOR A WHILE, THAT WE WERE GREAT FRIENDS AND EXCELLENT LOVERS. AND THEN FORGET ME. GRIEVE ME LIKE I’M DEAD. MOVE ON. 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.

My hand started to shake. I knew it was pointless to text him back or try to call. I also knew that was the last communication I’d receive from him. I stared at the words on the screen, still disbelieving that this was happening, still waiting to wake up.

I flashed on scenes, a woman who knew him in a Paris nightclub, who called him by another name and touched him lightly on the cheek before he pushed her hand away and said there had been some mistake. The voice mail from just a couple of weeks ago: Marcus, my friend, it’s Ivan. Just in from Czech. There’s so much to talk about. His tone, light and friendly, still managed to sound ominous. He left a number to call. Marcus seemed to go stiff as I relayed the message, then claimed he had no idea who it might have been. “Erase it,” he said. “Wrong number.” When I pressed him about it, he said, “Who knows? Someone from Czech, looking for a job, wanting something for nothing, thinking I owed something to a fellow countryman. No thanks.” I let it go, even though I was sure there was more to it. If he didn’t want to talk about it, there must have been a good reason.

There was something else, too. Something recent and strange that I had ignored. I kept receiving bizarre e-mails in the mailbox on my Web site. Normally, I received multiple messages a day from fans, detractors, booksellers inviting me for events, conference invitations, and the like. Every now and again, I’d get an e-mail from someone who wanted me to write his story or from someone with a “brilliant idea” for my next novel. And sometimes the mail was just from crazy people, with threats, rantings about mistakes they thought I’d made, inappropriate requests for pictures, and blatant come-ons.

Over the last few weeks, I’d received two or three messages from someone claiming to have information about my husband. “You’re in danger,” I remember one e-mail reading. “Your husband is not who you think he is.” I’d had so much strange e-mail over the years that I just pressed Delete, without giving it so much as a second thought. Now I racked my brain for the name of the sender, for more of what had been included in the text of the messages. But I’d barely glanced at them; deleted them and forgotten them.

Then, suddenly, I knew where to go. Somewhere safe, somewhere where I could use a computer, get on the Internet and figure out what to do next, try to find those e-mails, which might still linger in my trash folder. The thought gave me a new energy, a feeling of purpose and strength. One thing I wasn’t going to do? Move on. If Marcus thought I was just going to crawl under the covers and grieve him, I was as much a stranger to him as he was to me.

GRADY WATCHED THE cab disappear into a stream of other taxies up Broadway. He’d considered physically restraining Isabel Raine. But instead he let her go. Had to. No legal reason to hold her. If he put his hands on her, he was opening himself up to seven kinds of trouble. Trouble he didn’t need. So he let her have her flight response and hoped she came back to him when he called. Or on her own when she realized how badly she needed help from the police.

She was beautiful, in a Manhattan kind of way. That is to say edgy, with nice style and pretty skin. But she wasn’t his type. Not that he’d been asked, but a woman like Isabel Raine was not for him-too much angst, too much intellect-like his ex. He wanted someone who didn’t think about being happy. He just wanted someone who was happy, who went with the current of life and love, not someone bent on swimming upstream all the time.

“Where’d she go?” Breslow at his elbow.

“She freaked. Her accounts are close to empty.”

She nodded as though it was news she expected. “What’s she going to do?”

“My guess?” he said, still looking up Broadway in the direction of the cab that had sped Isabel away. “Something stupid.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jez nod her agreement.

“Let’s find Camilla Novak,” Breslow said after a moment. “I think we have to go back to that point to figure out what’s happening here.”

Grady shrugged. He didn’t have any better ideas. But he stood rooted in place; there was something else nagging at him. He couldn’t quite get a hold on it, though.

“Today, Crowe,” said Breslow impatiently. “I’ve got to pick up Benjy at three in Riverdale.”

“The doorman,” said Crowe.

“Who? Shane?”

“Yeah.”

“Never showed up at his apartment today.”

“Let’s get a warrant and search his place first.”

“I don’t think we’ll get a warrant just because the guy didn’t turn up at home after work.”

“He had opportunity to let the intruders in, he left his post before the next guy showed, and he withheld information. Let’s try.”

She raised her eyebrows at him and gave a quick nod, took her phone from her coat. She always made these kinds of calls, had more finesse, more relationships and less of a temper. Things just always seemed to go easier when Jez handled them. Crowe found he could rub a certain kind of person the wrong way. He had no idea why.

His ex had called the night before last. He knew it was her when he heard the phone ring, though she hadn’t called him in months. He’d just finished working out on the weight bench he kept in the basement of the Bay Ridge row house they’d shared.

“Keep it, Grady” she’d said of the house when they were splitting up assets. “I hate Brooklyn. And I hate this house.” They’d inherited the house from his grandparents and hadn’t been able to afford to change much. So they walked over the same linoleum floors his father had as a child, endured the same pink-tiled bathrooms, and climbed the same creaky steps. But he loved that house, and it was theirs free and clear-paid off long ago, taxes insanely low. So we sell it. Buy something that’s ours. He wouldn’t, couldn’t sell the house where his father had grown up, where he had, too, essentially. Their first and angriest arguments were about that house.

He was breathless, his shirt damp with sweat, when he heard the phone ringing. Something about the way it traveled through the house, how he heard the ringing through the floorboards, made his palms tingle. He took the stairs two at a time and got to the phone, an avocado-green wall unit, by the third ring.

“Crowe,” he answered.

Just silence on the line. But it was her silence. He’d know the sound of her anywhere.

“Clara. Don’t hang up.”

A round release of air, as though she was trying to cloud cold glass with her breath. When she spoke, her voice was taut. “How did you know it was me?”

“Every time the phone rings, I think it’s you. I just happened to be right tonight.”

“Stop it.”

“I miss you. Clara,” he said, and it sounded like a plea, “I could die from how much. I keep thinking about the last time.”

He heard the sharp intake of breath that he knew meant she was going to cry, and he felt close to tears himself, a thickness in his throat.

“Come back to me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d begged.

“I have to go. I shouldn’t have called you.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. She hung up and he leaned his head against the wall. “Wait,” he said again into dead air. He drew his fist back and punched the wall hard. The plaster buckled in a near-perfect circle and he brought his hand back fast to his chest. The pain started dull, slow, then radiated up his arm, his knuckles split and bleeding.

“Fuck,” he whispered, though he wanted to scream. The pain felt good. He’d rather have physical pain than the raw gnawing he’d had in his chest since Clara left. Unfortunately, now he had both.

“I’VE BEEN MEANING to ask what happened to your hand,” said Jez as they sped up the Henry Hudson, the dirty river glinting to their left, the city rising to their right. The warrant issued through some magic on Jez’s part, they were headed to Charlie Shane’s Inwood address.

“Bar fight.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What?”

“Let’s just say I see you more as a lover than a fighter.”

“Nice,” he answered, slightly offended. They were partners after all; supposed to have each other’s back. Did she really think he couldn’t hold his own in a brawl? He stopped short of asking.

“Seriously.”

“Hurt it working out. Punching bag.”

She nodded, looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything else. She had that motherly way about her, always with a tissue in her purse and a nose for bullshit. She always had snacks, too-peanut-butter crackers or granola bars.

“I know it’s not easy,” she said finally, looking out the window and not at him, almost as if she was thinking aloud. He didn’t bother pretending that he didn’t know what she was talking about. They took the rest of the ride in silence.

11

Fred was standing in the doorway when I reached the front step of the house. He wore an expression of concern as he watched the taxi depart. In his gray cardigan sweater and pressed navy slacks, he was solid, comforting, stronger than his seventy-five years.

“Isabel Blue,” he said.

He’d called me this since we first became friends, a few years after he married my mother. The timing of this coincided with my sister leaving for college. When she moved into the city to go to Columbia University, she took a lot of her anger with her. I’d always adored and worshipped my older sister and I grieved her departure from the house, but even I had to admit that the dynamics in our home shifted for the better without her.

Like sand over ice, her absence allowed us to find firmer footing with each other. We were able to welcome my father’s memory home-hanging old photographs, my mother and I talking openly, fondly, about him and the good things we remembered. Linda had hated for anyone to mention him, had sunk into despair on his birthday, Father’s Day. For Linda, sadness had always been best expressed through anger. And her outbursts were frequent and passionate. With therapy and Erik, that had changed in her adult life. But out of loyalty to her-and not a little fear of her temper-I had kept my distance from Fred for the early years of his marriage to our mother.

Fred always weathered the storms of Linda’s unhappiness with patient stoicism, as though he believed on some level that he deserved her anger. Maybe he did. I don’t know. With the fog of her unhappiness dissipated, Fred and I saw each other for the first time over the kitchen table. I was dressed for school, feeling sad, missing my sister. He said, “Isabel Blue.”

I looked at him and he offered me a warm smile. “It’s not so bad, Isabel. She’s just a train ride away.”

I didn’t have words for it then, the sad hollow inside me, the recognition that everything changes, that people die or they just leave you, and that you’re expected to move along in the current of your life as though nothing has happened. It seemed terribly unfair to me at thirteen years old. Why did people even bother with anything if it was all just going to fade away or be wrested from you?

“My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.” Fred was fond of haiku.

What a weirdo with his stupid sayings and those long, slow walks. How could she have married him? My sister’s nasty comments lingered in my head. But that morning I suddenly saw someone different. Now that she was gone, not always whispering something in my ear, I saw someone kind, much like my father, but someone present, mindful-not like my father. Even when my father was smiling, laughing, joking, I could sometimes see it behind his eyes-anxiety, unhappiness-flickering like a firefly in a jar.

“What does that mean?” I asked. I liked the rhythm of the words. I liked the way each word fell to the ground with its particular weight but how the meaning seemed to hover somewhere just above me.

“Think about it.”

I did. I thought about it a lot.

“YOUR MOTHER’S NOT here, dear,” Fred said, stepping aside and sweeping me into the house with a strong arm around my shoulder. I saw him looking at the bandage on my head, but he didn’t mention it, as though he thought that might be rude. “She’s off for some pampering with her girlfriends at Canyon Ranch.”

“I know,” I said, letting him take my wrap, avoiding eye contact.

He laid it over the settee in the triple-height grand foyer. The entry was bathed in a sunny wash from the skylights above. The sunlight caught on the million tiny crystals in the chandelier and cast rainbow flecks around us on the floor.

If my mother had been home, there’d be noise-a television, music, the sound of her chatting on the phone. The sound would bounce off the high ceilings, the marble floors, seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. She couldn’t stand a quiet house, or a dark one. There must always be sound and light. Today it seemed to echo with her absence with Fred’s thoughtful, quiet energy.

“What’s happened to you, Isabel?” he asked finally, turning me gently to face him with hands on my shoulders. “Who did this to you?”

“I-” I started, trying to think of a lie. But then I didn’t have the energy. “I don’t exactly know.”

“Let’s sit you down somewhere,” he said, again moving me along with that strong arm. I felt myself rest against him, the weight of it all just too much suddenly. He brought me to the large plush couch in front of the fireplace, which was lit but dwindling to embers. I sank into the soft chenille, the cushions seeming to fold around me like an embrace. I told Fred what happened to me, withholding nothing, from Marcus not coming home two nights ago through my visit to the ATM.

“I need to use the computer, figure out how much he’s taken from me. I need to try to do some research into this other missing Marcus Raine.”

Fred sat on the hassock in front of me. He’d paced and frowned during my surprisingly calm and distanced telling of events, then came to sit there and put a hand on my arm.

“What you need is rest, Isabel.” His tone was gentle but firm. “I’m going to call our lawyer and some people we know in the police department, and they’re going to handle this mess. You are going to take a bath and get into bed.”

“Fred, I can’t do that-” I started to say. But the couch was so soft and the room was so warm. He lifted my feet from the floor and placed them on the hassock where he’d sat a moment before. I sank deeper into the cushions. The room around me started to get blurry and I thought of how that ER doctor had told me I needed to rest or suffer the consequences. I wondered if this sudden fading of will and awareness was what he meant. I felt the weight of a blanket on top of me.

“Don’t worry, Isabel. We’ll figure this all out.”

“I just need to use the computer,” I said, but it didn’t sound like my voice, the words thick in my mouth.

“I’ll bring you the laptop,” he said. “We’re wireless now, after Trevor and Emily complained during their last visit.” I thought he might be humoring me but I suddenly lacked the strength to say so. The gray air darkened and swallowed me.

WHEN A HARD, loud crack, like a thick branch snapping, brought me back, I felt myself swim up through layers of deep sleep before I broke into the bright light of the room. The sound still echoed in my head, though now there was only silence. I listened to the quiet noises of the house-the ticking of the clock, the hum of heat through the vents-my whole body tense and tingling, my breathing heavy.

Like a honeycomb, all the rooms downstairs in Fred and Margie’s house connected by small hallways and pocket doors, creating a kind of circle of adjacent rooms around the foyer-the parlor led to the dining area, which flowed into the kitchen. Another exit from the kitchen led to a short, narrow passage that drifted into a massive library and study with a second-floor landing. That room reconnected to the foyer.

The sliding doors that led from the parlor to the foyer were closed, but the doors that connected it to the large dining room were open. I heard a soft click, like the sound of a lock turning.

I almost called out Fred’s name but something stopped me. Instead I slipped from the couch and let the blanket that covered me fall to the floor. I walked quietly over plush carpet toward the dining room in time to see three bulky shadows drift across the far wall. I felt a deep thump of dread in my chest, and suddenly the air around me, time itself, seemed thick and toxic with the energy of my own fear.

I scanned the room quickly for anything I might use to defend myself, and my eyes came to rest on the wrought-iron fire poker on the hearth. I grabbed it too quickly, sending the stand and the other tools toppling loudly to the stone. In the aftermath of sound, even the house seemed to hold its breath. There was a deafening stillness where my mind raced through various options, none of them particularly appealing.

I DIDN’T GROW up in this house. Fred and my mother moved here shortly after I left home to go to NYU. Until then we’d stayed in the other house, a large, rambling, rundown old place, because my mother felt we’d lost too much to leave the only home we’d ever known. The studio where my father died was torn down and replaced with a garden my mother tended with care. “She spends more time out there than she ever did with him,” my sister observed bitterly. It was true, of course. And seeing her out there, on her knees in the dirt, pulling weeds and planting new bulbs in the spring, was not a comfort to us as the gardening must have been to her.

My sister and I could have left that house easily, every room, every creaking floorboard, every water stain akin to some memory of my father. Maybe it was my mother who wasn’t ready to leave it behind. Fred contented himself with laborious repairs and renovations that he could have easily hired out. Over time, he managed to update the plumbing and electricity, replace the roof, strip and stain old floors. There was painting and wallpapering, new carpets. By the time Margie and Fred left, the old house was fully renovated and sold to a young couple starting a family who wanted to leave the city. Fred told me later that it was therapy for him to restore that old house. There were a lot of things my father left behind that he couldn’t heal, places in the other man’s wake where he wasn’t wanted. But that house responded to his ministration, let him patch and repair its broken places. Like my mother’s memorial garden, it didn’t chafe with the attention, didn’t struggle, rebuff, or withdraw.

This house, this new house built to my mother’s specifications, was familiar but not native. I didn’t know which boards creaked. It didn’t have the hidden passages, old dumbwaiters, and storage cubbies. In this house, I couldn’t hide. I’d have to fight.

Luckily, terror is a shot of adrenaline to the heart. I’ve never been more awake or more alert as I moved carefully toward the dining room. But as I turned the corner, poker raised like a baseball bat, I found the room was empty. I paused at the entryway and listened, wondering for a moment if I was being paranoid, imagined the things I’d heard.

I moved quickly around the circle of rooms, wondering if I’d come upon a serene Fred sitting in his study. He’d be surprised to see me wielding a fire poker. But all the rooms were empty until I came to the foyer.

It took a second for the scene to register. Fred, that kind and good man, who’d cared for us all with patience and respect, lay still and white on the marble floor, an impossible amount of blood pooling from beneath his head. His arms and legs were slightly akimbo, as though he was preparing to make a snow angel. I dropped to my knees beside him, let the poker clatter to rest on the floor.

I didn’t have time to weep or scream. Those bulky shadows rose on the wall in front of me. I wasn’t alone. I spun around to see three men move into the foyer from the study. I realized that they must have been following me around the circle of rooms. I reached for the poker, but one of them kicked it away from me.

In spite of his tremendous size-six foot four at least, and well over 250 pounds-there was something sickly and almost fragile about this man, something unwell around the eyes. He was pale to the point of being gray. He held a ridiculously large gun, which he raised slowly, almost reluctantly, in my direction. I held very still, tried to take in all the details.

The other men, similarly armed, were slighter but just as menacing, shared his same unhealthy pallor. The two smaller men looked like brothers, each with sandy-blond hair and something weak about the set of their jaws. I tried to say something but the horror of my situation had made my mouth dry, filled my throat with gauze. I found myself inching backward, like a crab, on feet and hands. Every instinct in my body made me want to be away from these men.

The large man raised his free hand. “Just stay still,” he said with a smile. “Please don’t move.”

I recognized his voice instantly from the voice mail I’d heard. Ivan. But I was smart enough not to say so. I looked at each pair of eyes, searching for something I could relate to. But there was no fear, no remorse there. None of them even glanced in Fred’s direction, as if they were accustomed to being in the presence of violence and spilled blood.

“Just tell us where he is. And,” Ivan said, shrugging and pointing to the door, “we leave.”

I had completely lost my ability to communicate; this scenario was so far out of my frame of reference, something that I might have imagined and written. But nothing in my life had prepared me for this type of event. I looked over at Fred, then back at Ivan. He gave me an almost friendly smile but there was something terrible about it, something dark.

“He’s not dead,” he said lightly. He pointed to Fred and then to his own square brow. “The head. It bleeds a lot, you know?”

To illustrate, he walked over to Fred and gave him a soft kick in the ribs. I was elated to hear my stepfather groan in pain, see his eyelids flutter. I moved over to him quickly, felt his blood soak through my skirt. I put a hand on his forehead; it was cool and clammy. I looked up at the three men.

“If you’re looking for Marcus,” I said, finally finding my voice, “I have no idea where he is.”

Ivan regarded me carefully, seemed to size me up and consider my words. I became conscious of time passing quickly. My cell phone was in the pocket of my skirt. I wondered if I could press 911 and send without him noticing. Fred needed help fast.

“He betrayed me, stole from me,” Ivan said, angry, almost petulant. “He tried to kill me.”

He lifted his shirt with his free hand to show me a swath of bandages around his chest, too much blood-garish red against the white-seeping through the gauze. I saw sweat emerge on his gray forehead. Was he the one I’d heard screaming? One of his colleagues lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. The smell filled my sinuses. I shifted my hand into my pocket. But Ivan shook his head at me. I removed it slowly.

“He betrayed me, too,” I said finally. We could have been discussing anything-the crumbling economy, bad weather, gravity, forces out of our control that can change our lives. I felt a sudden wash of rage.

“Look at me!” I yelled suddenly, startling all of them. Both of the smaller men raised their guns. The smoker let his cigarette drop to the floor. I pointed to my own head. “Someone did this to me. A tall woman, a blonde, from Czech like you. She destroyed Marcus’s office, probably my home, too. They took everything from me. If I knew where he was, do you think I’d be here?”

Ivan considered me. I noticed a deep scar on his face, that his hands were callused. I was still yelling, trying to make him understand.

“Hush, hush,” he said, as though he was talking to a weeping child. And I realized I was weeping, big rivers of tears streaming down my face. I wiped at them with my sleeve. “Don’t yell.”

I saw it then, the way he didn’t like me yelling, was uncomfortable with my tears. He was a bit on the slow side, not quite disabled but someone with a very low IQ. There was something babyish about him, too, and something skittish. A child used to being brutalized, one who’d developed a flinch. Suddenly there was a strangely familiar expression on his face, something around his red-rimmed eyes, the corners of his mouth. I thought of Marcus’s photo album. Had he been in there? Had I seen him before?

“She was tall. Nearly as tall as you, with blond hair and green eyes,” I said more softly. “She knew Marcus,” I continued when he didn’t say anything.

He nodded slowly, a deep frown furrowing his brow, his expression going dark.

“Do you know who I’m talking about?”

He nodded again, but this time to his two friends. He said something in Czech that I didn’t understand. The two men both looked at me for a second and I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake. They got what they wanted from me and now they’d have no use for me or Fred. I’d lost my gamble. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, the two smaller men had moved toward the door and were exiting. I heard their footfalls on the landing. They were bold, these men. Coming and going in broad daylight, not hiding themselves or their vehicle. Were they careless or apathetic? Aware that the property was removed from the street, not visible to the neighbors? They must have been watching the apartment, followed me up here from the city. I’d been too oblivious, too naive to notice.

A second later, with my heart a turbine engine in my chest, I heard a car hum to life outside. Ivan raised his gun at me, but this time I didn’t look away. I didn’t want to make it easier for him to kill me; I wanted him to see my eyes.

“Who is he?” I asked. “What’s his name?”

Fred shifted and moaned beside me. Ivan offered that same weird smile again, this time accompanied by a low chuckle.

“Tell me,” I said, holding his gaze. “I need to know. If you’re going to kill me, I want to know my husband’s name before I die.”

Something strange passed between us. Two people who might as well be living on different planets, our experiences and ideas, our intellects were so opposite. In that moment, we were unified by rage and betrayal. He lowered his gun.

“His name is Kristof Ragan.” The smile dropped from his face. “He is my brother.”

He raised a finger to his lips then and made a shushing noise. Then he took that same finger and drew it slowly across his neck, whispering something in Czech that I didn’t understand. On the other hand, I don’t suppose I needed an interpreter.

Then he turned and left, more quickly and gracefully than I would have imagined possible of a man his size. I was already dialing 911 when I heard the car move down the drive.

BY THE TIME Linda returned to the loft, she was frazzled and drained. After a long, slow trip uptown to Isabel’s apartment, she learned that she’d missed her sister by minutes, according to the cop in the hallway. She was shocked to look over his shoulder and see Izzy’s apartment trashed, but she wasn’t allowed inside. The detectives working the case had also left, following up a lead. She left feeling frustrated and filled with a sick anxiety. She’d inherited her mother’s proclivity for worry. Fight it as she might, she’d never quite been able to overcome it.

She had a tension headache brewing when she closed the door and saw Erik waiting on the couch. Something about the look on her husband’s face ratcheted the pain up a notch. Dread and guilt duked it out in her chest as she moved closer to him.

“What?” she said by way of greeting, more testily than she’d intended.

“We need to talk, Linda.” She felt a jangle of alarm as she flashed on her assignation in the bathroom at the Java Stop. So tawdry. So foolish. Did she want to ruin her life and marriage? Erik could have easily seen her coming or going. Maybe someone in the building had heard Ben pleading at the intercom, mentioned it to Erik.

“Sure,” she said, laying her bag by the door. She moved over to the couch and curled herself up in a ball there. In spite of the tension, she still found herself glancing about at the perpetual mess that was their home. If it was cluttered, at least it was clean-but only because of the weekly cleaning woman. How long had Trevor’s soccer jersey been hanging off that chaise? Wasn’t it anybody else’s responsibility but hers to pick up after the kids? Weren’t they old enough to pick up their own stuff?

“Don’t worry about the mess, Linda. I’ll take care of it in a minute.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

He released a breath through his nose. He was perched on a stool, a half-full glass of water in his hand. She found she couldn’t look at him directly, couldn’t hold those earnest, loving eyes. She didn’t deserve that gaze. She looked down at her fingernails. Her nails were a mess; she needed a manicure.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. He shifted off the stool and came over to her, sat heavily beside her on the couch. “I’ve done something really stupid, possibly unforgivable, Linda.”

Relief mingled with concern and she raised her eyes to his face. She saw him then, maybe for the first time in days. Their busy life was a perpetual swing dance between kids and home, her work and his, meals and pickups and drop-offs from various activities-kung fu for Emma, violin lessons for Trevor. Sometimes they just fell into a heap on the couch after the kids went to bed and watched an hour of television, or read in bed until one fell asleep and the other turned off the light. She thought some days he noticed the dishes in the sink before he noticed what she was wearing or that she’d changed her perfume. Sometimes she thought they’d see each other more if they worked apart, each of them going to an office and returning home at the end of the day.

She regarded his sandy stubble and ocean-blue eyes, the lean lines of his high cheekbones, his aquiline nose. That face had tamed her heart. He had sunshine at his core, a breezy summer day at the beach.

“What are you so mad about?” he’d asked early in their relationship. A swank gallery in SoHo; he was fifteen minutes late. It wasn’t even her show. But she raged at him on the street in the rain. “Because I know you’re not this angry about my being fifteen minutes late.”

She felt as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. Embarrassed, sobered, she caught sight of her reflection in the gallery’s picture window. She didn’t recognize her own expression, her own posture. A few people were watching; one strikingly thin woman smirked, a small plastic cup of wine in her hand. Why he didn’t walk away right then, she never could figure out.

“You’re too young, too beautiful, too good to let yourself be this way,” he whispered, taking her hands. She knew then that he really saw her, that he might have been the first and only person who ever had, other than her sister. The face she wore for everyone else, the demure and polite smile, the unfailingly kind demeanor, the proper girl who did everything right… he didn’t even notice it. When he looked at her he saw straight to the heart of her.

Within a month, she was seeing a shrink, trying to figure out why indeed she was so angry. And then she had to claw her way out of the quicksand of her own inner life before coming to shore. In a cozy office on the Upper West Side, a motherly psychologist with a comforting wave of gray hair and a soft bosom asked her, over time, questions she almost couldn’t stand to hear.

“Do you really blame your mother for moving on, for doing what she thought she had to save herself and her girls? Do you really hate Fred for loving your mother? Isn’t it just that you’re angry with your father for abandoning you, for being absent emotionally before that? Isn’t it just safer to be angry at living people because there’s no way to resolve the anger you have toward your father? Do you really think he loved your sister more than he did you?”

These were the hard things she had to face and answer. But she never would have thought to confront them at all if not for Erik. And where would she be then? She reached for him, touched his face and let her hand drift down to his shoulder.

“How could anything you’ve done be unforgivable?” she asked. He lowered his head at this, put his chin all the way to his chest.

“Linda.”

“I forgive you,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

She slid into him and wrapped him tight in her arms. She held on to him, her buoy against the great tides of regret and shame, guilt for the things she’d done, how she’d betrayed him. I’m so sorry, she said to his heart. I’ll never see him again.

“Linda,” he said again, pulling away from her. She looked at his face and didn’t like what she saw there. Despair. A dark flower of dread started to bloom in her center.

“Erik,” she said, releasing a breath with his name. “What is it?”

IT HAD SEEMED like only seconds after the 911 call, as I begged and pleaded with Fred to open his eyes, that police and paramedics were at the scene. The next thing I knew, Fred was lifted into the back of an ambulance, I climbed in after him, and we raced toward the hospital. More police were waiting when we arrived and Fred was wheeled away.

I stared after him, wondering if my carelessness had ended his life. I didn’t feel anything but a kind of numbness. A voice in my head kept telling me, This is not happening. Wake up.

A cop started asking me questions: What happened? How was it that I was already injured? Could I describe the men who did this to my stepfather? I asked for Detective Crowe. He was called. I was escorted to a waiting area.

I waited, pacing. Fatigue was replaced by nervous energy. I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t keep my mind from racing back over the story of my marriage, looking for the chinks, the flaws in the plot. And there they were, the clues, the foreshadowing that the hero was really a villain, waiting behind the curtain with his dagger drawn.

But no. Life’s not so simple. People are many things, each of them true. Marcus was my husband. He was right: We were great friends and excellent lovers. That was true once, even if it didn’t matter much now.

I came back to the present when a doctor pushed into the room, told me that a bullet had grazed Fred’s head, leaving a valley over his ear but never penetrating his skull. He’d lost a lot of blood but he’d walk away from the injury. A lucky man. Then, suddenly, Detective Crowe was there with his little black notebook and expensive pen, taking a statement from me that I now barely remember giving. I wondered how he’d gotten there so fast, and he told me they’d been in Inwood, searching the apartment of Charlie Shane, my doorman, another familiar figure in my life who, it seemed, was not what he appeared. They’d found nothing useful. But Charlie had disappeared.

I vaguely recall offering Detective Crowe a recount of the events at Fred and Margie’s house. Was it skepticism that I saw on his face as I recounted the scene?

“Isabel.” There was that friendly use of my name again. “Are you leaving something out?” His pen hovered.

“Of course not,” I answered, indignant.

I felt the weight of his gaze. “Don’t be foolish,” he said quietly, moving a little closer to me.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He let an awkward minute pass, during which I looked at my cuticles in the horrid white fluorescent light. I watched nurses with their swift, quiet steps, listened to the incessant electronic rippling of a telephone that no one answered.

“You know what’s starting to bother me?” he asked finally.

“What’s that?”

“You seem to be having all these run-ins with unsavory types-FBI impersonators and European thugs-and yet you always emerge unscathed. Meanwhile, the bodies of the injured and dead litter the scene.” Poetry again, from the gentleman cop.

I fixated on the word choice a moment, as I’m prone to do, analyzed it for its appropriateness. Unscathed: without suffering any injury or harm.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve ‘emerged unscathed,’ Detective. Quite the opposite.” I pointed to my head but I was thinking of the deeper injuries, my riven life, the derailed narrative of my marriage.

“Relatively speaking,” he said with an assenting lift of his shoulders. “What I meant was, there was really no reason I can see for any of these people to leave you breathing. We’re not talking about people operating with conscience. We’re talking about murderers and thieves. So I find myself asking: Why are you still alive?”

It was a good question and one I’d certainly asked myself, even posed to my sister.

“Any theories?” I asked, only half a smart-ass.

“One theory might be that you have a greater involvement in this than we initially suspected. That rather than a victim, you might be an accomplice, hiding in plain sight, playing the role of the injured wife.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Because to me, you don’t seem like the type for this sort of thing. This woman you see on the talk shows-her husband has another family in Kalamazoo, or her suitor took off with her life savings-that’s not you. You’re sharp, aren’t you? Together.”

“Maybe not sharp enough to be immune to subterfuge, but definitely too sharp to be a part of anything like this. People dead around me, my stepfather very nearly killed, all my money gone, my sister’s money? No. No.” Just the recounting of it all filled me with that dangerous cocktail of rage and fear. I realized suddenly that both of my fists were clenched hard, nails digging ruthlessly into my palms. I released them with difficulty.

“Then just tell me what you’re holding back.”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to look as earnest as possible. “I swear.”

Lies are a contagion, a virus that replicates itself. Marc’s deception was the germ that had infected me. I was sick with it, fevered with a compulsion to understand how he’d managed to deceive me and why, so I was coughing up lies of my own. The detective was right. I was withholding information. The text message from Marcus, the name given to me by Ivan, his alleged brother-those things belonged to me. It felt like all I had left. If I let him have these things, I’d have lost ownership of them as well.

“I don’t believe you,” he said simply.

“I want a lawyer.”

He raised a hand, gave me a warning look. “If you go down that road, it puts us on opposite teams.”

Oh, spare me. Did he really think he could manipulate me out of my rights?

“Our conversation ended thirty seconds ago,” I said.

The detective pressed his mouth into a thin, tight line and I saw his nostrils flare just slightly. Would he blush or pale with his frustration? I wondered. Then his cheeks fired up, a lovely rosey blush on the white of his skin. Marcus always used to go gray when he was angry. It didn’t seem healthy. Red is the color of emotion brought forth, a brilliant rush of flame that burns hot and incinerates itself. Gray is the color of ire that’s eating you up inside, hollowing you out.

Detective Crowe opened his mouth and then clamped it shut again. We had a brief staring contest, which I won. He lowered his eyes, turned and left the waiting room, the electricity of everything he had wanted to say trailing behind him. He’d have slammed the door, I’m sure, but the hydraulic hinge only allowed it to close with an unsatisfying hiss.

He wasn’t gone long-I was still staring at the door-when Linda and Erik burst through. I’d called Linda upon arriving at the hospital, quite by instinct. I barely remembered the conversation. Her arrival caused some odd combination of anxiety and relief. Trevor and Emily followed behind, holding hands, looking like bush babies with wide eyes and nervous smiles. The sight of this made me sad. If they weren’t fighting, they were scared. I had to take responsibility for everything. I’d let Marcus into our lives, and he’d damaged us all.

“Have you seen Fred since he arrived? What happened?” Linda asked, rushing to me, grabbing me hard with both arms. Then, “How could you just race off like that? And why haven’t you answered my calls? I’ve been really worried about you.”

I let myself sink into her strong embrace, into the soft cashmere of her coat, didn’t even bother answering her questions. Over her shoulder, I looked at Erik, who gave me a sad nod. Suddenly I could feel the undercurrent of tension between them and I knew he’d told Linda everything.

“Fred’s okay,” I said into her shoulder. “He’s going to be fine.”

I recounted the events at the house, leaving out the details I’d kept from Detective Crowe. I didn’t want them to know anything that could get them in trouble later.

“You need a lawyer,” Erik said, pulling his cell phone from his coat.

“Call Fred and Margie’s guy,” Linda said to him, her tone polite but clipped. “I left messages for Mom-one on her cell phone and a message at the hotel desk. They said they’d find her and tell her there was an emergency. I know she’ll come right home.” She shot me an apologetic look. “With Fred being hurt, I had to call her.”

I nodded my understanding. “I called, too, of course.”

Emily and Trevor hadn’t said a word, something I wouldn’t have thought possible just two days ago. I knelt down and opened my arms and they both came to me. I held on to them, felt their arms wrap around my body.

“It’s okay” I whispered, even though this was a lie, that disease again.

“Mom is really mad at Daddy,” Emily whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Linda bow her head. Erik turned toward the window and looked out at the parking lot. He seemed to be scrolling through the phone book on his cell; I could hear the soft musical beeping as he scanned contacts.

“It’s okay,” I repeated. “Everything is going to be fine.”

I pulled back, looked at their sad little faces, gave them each a kiss, then reluctantly moved away.

“I’m going to check on Fred,” I said to Linda.

“I’ll come with you.” I didn’t want her to, but I could hardly refuse. I grabbed my bag off the chair and Erik’s voice followed us out.

“This is Erik Book, Fred and Margie Thompson’s son-in-law. Is John Brace in?”

In the hall Linda grabbed my hand and held on tight as we walked.

“You already know,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It’s going to be okay.” This was fast becoming my stock response as everything fell apart around us. But I found I couldn’t look at her long, or give her the comfort of my gaze. Her blue, blue eyes seemed to glow in the pale landscape of her face. The purple smudges under her eyes, the strain around her mouth hurt me too much. She didn’t have to say anything else; I knew every emotion rocketing through her. I could feel it through her skin. And she knew she didn’t have to say anything. We’d talk later, dissect and analyze, figure and resolve.

But for the moment we moved down the hall toward the room Fred now occupied, not saying a word. Before we got to his door, I stopped and took both her hands.

“Forgive him, Linda. As awful as it is, he did it for you.”

“I forgive him,” she said, not looking at me. “I just don’t know if I can live with it. I feel like Mom. He did all this, risked our whole future, and I didn’t even know. There are other things, too. My fault. I don’t know if we’re strong enough to survive everything that’s wrong.”

“Don’t say that.” The thought of their marriage falling apart because of a mistake I had made filled me with a terrible anxiety. “Please. Let me fix this.”

“This is not for you to fix, Iz,” she said, putting a gentle hand on my face. “Don’t you get that? You didn’t do anything wrong. You loved him.”

“You warned me. This is my fault.”

“Even I didn’t imagine this, honey. This is not what I meant. I just thought he was a jerk, that he couldn’t love you the way you deserved.”

“You were right,” I said. I let her take me in her arms, rested my head on her shoulder. “Don’t leave him, Linda. Your marriage, your family. It’s real, it’s solid. It can survive anything. It’s only money.”

She squeezed me hard but didn’t answer. “Let’s go see about Fred,” she said after a moment, pulling away from me and taking my hand. She didn’t want to talk anymore; I let her off the hook and led her to Fred’s room.

We stopped at the entrance to the dim space, watched Fred’s still, narrow form, listening to the reassuring tones of his heart monitor. I was buffeted by twin tides of regret and anger. But when he saw us huddling in the doorway, he smiled. That was Fred. He could always manage a smile. Or maybe it was the pain medication.

“You look just like when you were girls,” he said. A dreamy, loopy quality to his words made me wish for a little dose of whatever they’d given him. Linda moved to the bed and took his hand. The births of Emily and Trevor had brought them closer. Fred was a wonderful grandfather, the only one her children knew. He showered them with love, and I think in recent years she was finally able to see the man we all saw. She’d take care of him until Margie got back; I knew that. The good girl.

“I’m sorry, Fred,” I said from the doorway. “I’d never have come to you if I knew…” I let the sentence trail.

He shook his head slowly. “I’m glad you did. I just wish I could have protected you, Isabel. I keep forgetting I’m an old man.”

I went to his bedside and leaned down to gently kiss his forehead. He pointed to his bandage. “Maybe we could get everyone else to wear one just so we don’t look so silly.”

We both smiled and Linda leaned in to kiss him on the cheek when her phone rang. She answered it quickly.

“Mom,” she said. “Everything’s okay.”

With Linda talking and Fred looking at her expectantly, neither of them noticed as I slipped from the room. I backed into the hallway and then walked toward the elevator bank, just missing the closing doors of one car. I pressed the button hard a couple of times, but the digital screen above it told me the car was floors away and I might be waiting awhile. I decided on the stairs.

“Where are you going, Izzy?”

I turned to see Trevor looking slim and stylish in faded jeans and a retro rock-and-roll Ramones T, Vans on his feet. His curls were wild; a worried smile flashed his face, then turned into a frown.

“I’m going to get some air,” I lied.

He shook his head just slightly, and in that moment he looked so much like his mother-the same knowing aura, the same curious narrowing of the eyes. I saw him taking in details-the wrap on my shoulders, the bag strapped around my body.

“You’re going to find him, aren’t you?”

I considered lying again. But instead I nodded, lifted a finger to my mouth, and started backing toward the door.

“Do you have a gun?”

“No,” I said, startled by his boyish question, which seemed at the same time frighteningly practical. New York City kids are just a little too savvy for their own good. “Of course not.”

He shrugged. “You might need one.”

I might at that. “Don’t tell them you saw me leave.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe this is a bad idea.” He was one of the best players on his chess team. He could see that I was outmatched and about to make a stupid move that might cost me the game. Suddenly this little kid who I’d watch enter the world, who I’d rocked and carried, fed and changed, seemed smarter, more worldly than I was.

“Don’t,” was all I could manage. “Not for the next fifteen minutes.”

“Izzy?” I heard him say as I turned and moved quickly through the door and flew down the stairs as fast as I could. I knew him. He was a good egg, wanted things orderly, still thought the world was black and white, just like his mother. He’d tell-but he’d hesitate, just because he was a boy, because he liked the idea of being in on a secret. With luck, I’d be gone before anyone tried to come after me.

A HUNDRED YEARS ago Marcus and I were in Paris. For our first anniversary, he’d surprised me on a Thursday with tickets to leave the next day. We joked that we’d probably saved about a thousand dollars in pre-trip shopping-but I made up for it once we arrived.

“He did what?!” my sister shrieked when I called her. Her delight rang over the line and I knew he’d climbed a rung in her estimation, which filled me with childish pleasure. “That’s soooo romantic. Oh, I love Paris!”

“Dude, you’re making me look bad,” Erik complained when we were all on speakerphone together.

“Yeah, really bad,” said Linda. But I could hear the smile in her voice. They’d had their share of romantic trips and enviable moments. And now they had kids, as Linda liked to say. Romance is a pizza delivery and a bottle of wine after Emily and Trevor go to bed.

We stayed in a small, intimate hotel near Jardins des Tuilleries on the tranquil rue Saint-Hyacinthe and passed our days shopping, eating, drinking, fairly skipping through the streets of that magnificent city. I spent my mornings writing in a small café, ensconced at a tiny table in the corner, the competing aromas of fresh bread, coffee grinds, and cigarette smoke mingling in the air with lively conversation and the clinking of cups and silverware, while Marcus slept until nearly noon.

In the evenings, we dined slowly, lingering for hours over beautiful meals, then visiting nightclubs, dancing and drinking, returning to the hotel to make love. I don’t remember even the tiniest disagreement on that trip, but maybe that’s revisionist history. Maybe we argued over what sights to see, or whether we could afford more than one Hermès scarf, or where to go for dinner-all the normal negotiations of living a life together, that might blow up into something bigger. But I don’t remember anything like that.

On the other hand, there are some things that come back to me now, moments I hadn’t given much thought to then. He said he’d never been to Paris, that my surprise was secretly a gift for himself, too. But he seemed strangely at ease on its streets, as if he knew his way around.

“Are you sure you haven’t been here before?” I asked, my nose in our guidebook. He navigated the Metro with ease, quickly found exactly the café or shop or museum we were searching for, while I might as well have been on the moon.

“Maybe in another life,” he answered. There was something solemn to his tone that caused me to look up from my reading. But he was smiling when our eyes met. He pointed to his temple. “Smart. You married a very smart man.”

The truth was Marcus always seemed to know where we were or how to get to any destination. He had a mind for navigation, an uncanny internal GPS. I might wander lost and confused, even in my own city, turned around after a ride on the subway, unsure of east and west. Not Marcus. Not ever. It was annoying, how he was always right, but I found myself relying on it. A man like Marcus was the reason other men didn’t ask for directions.

Our last night in Paris, we were returning to the hotel, both of us a bit glum that the trip was coming to a close.

“One more,” Marcus said, grabbing my hand.

A narrow stairwell led down beneath the sidewalk. An electric strain of music seemed to waft up from the darkness. It was late. We had an early flight.

“Why not?” he said when I hesitated. “This time tomorrow we’ll be home.”

The damp stone staircase ended at a heavy wooden door. When he pulled it open, sound and smoke came out in a wave that pushed us back, then washed us in. Soon we were one with a throbbing mass of bodies that seemed to pulse in unison with the dance beat. We made our way to the bar, where Marcus shouted something at the pierced and scantily clad young woman who leaned in to take our drink order.

I normally don’t like crowds, overwhelmed as I become by details, energies, expressions on faces. But I felt oddly centered, able to coolly observe my environment. I could tell it was a local haunt; it lacked that Parisian self-awareness of its place in the dreams of the rest of the world. There was something gritty and slapdash about it, as though you could come back tomorrow and it might be gone. The chic, lithe Parisians I’d been staring at in envy for days in high-end shops and restaurants were replaced by an alternative set, tattoo covered and glinting with metal in odd places, nipples and tongues, eyebrows. I watched an androgynous couple make out near the door, a woman moving slowly to some internal beat, her eyes pressed closed. On a small stage, three men with identically styled dark hair and black garb were surrounded by electronic instruments and computers; they seemed to be the origin of the sound, though they were as grim and stone-faced as undertakers. I turned to comment to Marcus, but he was gone. I peered through the crowd and saw the back of his head as he moved toward the bathrooms. He must have yelled to me and I didn’t hear him over the din. There was a fresh drink on the tall table beside me which I assumed he’d left for me-something bitter and heavily alcoholic. When nearly twenty minutes passed, my drink gone, my interest in the scene around me dwindling, I headed in the direction I’d seen him disappear.

When I saw him, he was standing with a woman-she was emaciated and pale, with features too sharp, too angular for her to be quite pretty. She was talking to him heatedly, and he was looking around, clearly uncomfortable. Just as I approached them, she reached out and touched his face. I saw him grab her hand and push it gently away. She looked so injured, so confused, that I felt my heart clench for her.

He turned away and almost ran right into me.

“What’s going on?” I asked. It was quieter away from the stage but I still had to yell.

“Some crazy woman thinks she knows me. I can’t convince her otherwise,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Let’s go.”

“Kristof, please!” she yelled after us. “Please.”

He didn’t turn back to her, just hurried me toward the door. I felt some kind of primal tug to look at her again. She was yelling something I couldn’t make out.

“You don’t know her?” I asked him when we were outside. I felt oddly shaken, a slight tremble in my hands.

He was already walking away, came back and grabbed my hand. “No,” he said with a scowl. “Of course not.”

“The way she touched you-” I said, and found I couldn’t finish. From where I stood, I would have thought them lovers. Her touch was so intimate-her eyes so desperate. I stood rooted, not willing to follow him. I kept an eye on the door, wondering if she’d come out after us. I saw his eyes drift there, too.

“Isabel, she was high,” he said, tugging at me, his hand still in mine. I resisted, made him move back closer to me. “She called me by another name. You heard it yourself. She was clearly unwell or at least impaired.”

I found myself studying his face. His expression was earnest, even amused. His eyes were wide, brow lifted. He matched my gaze and then finally dropped his eyes to the sidewalk.

“Okay, you caught me,” he said, lifting his hands. “I have a girlfriend here in Paris. This whole trip was just a ruse so that I could rendezvous with her this last night-while you stood a few yards away.”

He gave me that magic smile then and the lightest drizzle started to fall. It all just washed away as he pulled me close.

“You’re not the jealous type, Iz.”

I bristled. It wasn’t about me being jealous or not. It was about a woman who wore an expression I recognized on some cellular level. Loss, betrayal, a touch of anger. I knew that face; I’d worn it for different reasons. But I didn’t say anything else. I let him drop his arm around my shoulder and steer me toward the hotel. I stole one last look behind us, sure I’d see her standing there grim and lonely in the rain. But the stairwell was dark and empty; I didn’t hear the music that had drawn us there anymore, either.

I WENT BACK to Linda and Erik’s. I had a key and knew that the apartment was empty; maybe not the best idea in the world but I was desperate. I needed space to think, a change of clothes, and some time on a computer. I also needed to figure out how to get some money. I’d stopped at the ATM and cleared out the rest of my cash, a hundred from each account. Now I had five hundred dollars, the money from the accounts plus what I’d already had in my wallet. I knew it wouldn’t last long. I still had my credit cards but I knew I couldn’t use them without creating a trail that was easily followed-that is, if he hadn’t maxed those out as well.

I took a shower in Linda’s bathroom, the only uncluttered space in the house. Her sanctuary with its stone walls and steam shower. The kids weren’t even allowed to enter. Sometimes I think she’d force Erik to use the kids’ bathroom if she could. I tried not to wet the bandage but failed and wound up peeling it off painfully.

After my shower, I looked at myself in the long mirrored wall over the marble sink and was shocked at how horrible the cut on my head looked, reaching from the middle of my brow to my temple-like something out of a horror film. My hair had been hideously shaved back a bit, which was bad enough. And the wound itself was too red, some dark yellow puss leaking out between the black stitching. I didn’t think the leakage was healthy, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I found some gauze and medical tape in the first-aid kit under the sink and bandaged myself up again, nearly nauseated by how much the wound hurt to the touch. I recalled then that I was supposed to be taking antibiotics. Were they in my bag? I couldn’t remember. Brown watched me mournfully, hands on his paws. He emitted a low whine from the doorway, as if he was concerned about me.

“It’s okay, Brown,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I padded into the kitchen with him at my heels, put some food in his bowl and changed his water, gave him a doggie treat. He seemed to feel better about things after this.

After choosing a pair of jeans and a black wool sweater from Linda’s closet, a matching pink bra and panties from her underwear drawer, I dressed and went into Trevor’s room, where I knew the computer was on 24/7, no log-in required.

I tried my accountant’s office again and just got an endless ringing, no voice mail ever picking up. I called directory assistance, tucking Trevor’s cordless phone between my shoulder and ear while simultaneously searching for the firm on Google. Maybe I had the wrong number.

“No listing for a Benjamin and Heller, Inc., in Manhattan or the five boroughs, ma’am.” And nothing online.

I realized I’d never visited their offices or even made a call to Arthur, the man who came to our house at tax time, who called me with the occasional question about my expenses, requesting this receipt or that canceled check. I let Marc handle it all. I just signed the quarterly tax reports and year-end returns without so much as a glance.

The computer screen swam before my tired eyes as I rechecked my bank accounts, since I knew those log-ins and passwords by heart. Nothing had changed except my recent withdrawals, when I’d basically cleaned myself out.

Then I checked our American Express bill, looking for Marc’s last charges, knowing he was too smart to be using his cards now. I was just grasping at what little information was available to me. All the usual charges-the smoothie shop at the gym, take-out places we liked, the grocery store, our local bar. I started scrolling back through the last few months.

Linda did this all the time, I knew. She checked the Amex bill daily, since they used it like cash, tracked all their expenses that way.

“Poor Erik can’t even buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks without my knowing about it,” she joked. The joke was on her, though, wasn’t it? She was so busy looking at the little things that the big ones completely eluded her. Not that I was one to judge.

I hadn’t looked at my credit-card statements in months, charged what I wanted, took out cash from the accounts I was told to and never once thought about what I was spending. I’d only checked a couple of months ago because my card had been declined.

“You’re using an expired card, Isabel,” said Marcus when I’d called him. Funny how I’d not thought to contact Amex or my accountant. “I left the new one on the kitchen counter about three weeks ago.”

I sifted through a pile of mail and found it with a little note: “Tear up your old card and use this one. Love you, M.”

Still I’d been sufficiently annoyed to think I should start taking more interest in our finances. But I’d quickly lost interest after a couple of days of checking things out.

At Trevor’s desk I found myself scanning Marc’s charges, his small-business card sharing an interface with our personal cards.

I sifted through a few months of charges before I started to see a pattern emerge. On or around the fifteenth of every month, there was a large charge on Marc’s business card, nearly two thousand dollars spent at a vendor listed on the statement as Services Unlimited, Inc. It really could have been any kind of legitimate business service, cleaning or document shredding or some kind of software licensing maybe. But it was the only thing that I could see that brought up any questions-even his charges on our personal card at Cornucopia (my favorite florist), dinner at the Mandarin Oriental, an obscene sum at La Perla, all coincided with gifts and evenings out that I remembered well.

I searched the Internet for Services Unlimited and found a Web site offering temporary “reception services.” Uniquely beautiful women in scanty business attire leaned over provocatively to take dictation or reach for files, listened attentively with pens in their mouths at a board meeting. I would have laughed under other circumstances at the raunchy silliness of it, but instead my insides clenched as I scrolled through page after page of leggy, pouty girls offering their “business skills.” Services Unlimited was an escort service, legal, ostensibly not offering sex, just arm candy. They took credit cards like any legitimate business. I tried to imagine Marcus with the type of woman I saw on page after page; I just couldn’t. I tried to imagine him paying for sex. He was too arrogant; it didn’t seem possible. But what did I know about Marcus? About anything? I’d only in the last few hours learned his real name.

I grabbed a worn Transformers notebook and a purple-inked pen from the shelf above Trevor’s computer. I was about to write down the number emblazoned across the top of the screen, a 718 exchange, meaning one of the outer boroughs, when I saw her, the woman from Marcus’s office. She was listed simply as “S.” Her description read: Six feet of pure stamina and efficiency.

I unconsciously lifted a finger to the cut on my head and startled myself with the pain-of the physical wound and the memory of the text message. I can still feel you inside me.

I tried to force the pieces together-the text message, the woman who’d attacked me carrying a gun, impersonating an FBI agent, now vamping on this Web site, the monthly charge on my husband’s credit card. This was beyond my experience, beyond my ability to weave a narrative from disconnected facts. I was still staring at her, all kinds of dark imaginings parading through my thoughts, when my phone started ringing. I checked the screen. Jack calling. My agent.

“Hey,” he said when I picked up. “Good news. A nice check arrived. On signing from the UK sale.”

She seemed to be challenging me, standing with her legs spread apart, clutching a phone, lips parted. I wanted to leap through the screen and strangle her, all my rage at the situation directed at her. Who are you? Who are you to my husband?

“Iz?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” When would all this hit the news? I wondered. Soon, I would think. Authors are rarely celebrities, but something like this could make me one. It would be just the kind of hook the media needed to sell the story: BESTSELLING AUTHOR’S HUSBAND TURNED VILLIAN-TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION.

“I need that money, Jack.”

“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’ll wire it tomorrow.”

“No. I need it today. In cash.”

There was a pause where I heard him tapping on his keyboard-multitasking, which I hated. Then: “Very funny.”

“Jack, pay attention,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”

Another pause, but the tapping stopped abruptly. “What’s going on?”

Jack and I had been friends since NYU. We met in a creative writing class. But he never had the patience-or the talent-for the actual writing, he realized. He just wanted the sale. After graduation he went straight to work at a literary agency, where a few years later he represented and sold my first novel. Eventually he started his own agency. We were allies, friends, and colleagues.

And once, just weeks before I met Marcus, we’d traveled together to a conference, where we’d gotten loaded at a local bar and wound up sleeping together. It might have always been there, this attraction, just beneath the surface, but the friendship and business relationship were so good that we’d just ignored the other, more volatile, aspect of our affection. I talked to him almost as often as I did my sister or my husband, but neither of us had ever again addressed the night we spent together. In the wee hours after our lovemaking, I’d dressed hastily and left his hotel room while he slumbered heavily. I wasn’t even certain if he remembered what happened that night.

Now I told him everything about the recent events of my life. Everything beginning with the night Marc didn’t return home, ending with the Web site open in front of me.

“Holy Christ,” he whispered into the phone when I was done. “Isabel, is this for real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Unfortunately, it is.”

“You’re hurt. Are you okay? Really okay?”

“I think so. How do I know? How is one supposed to handle a situation like this?”

“I think you’re not, Iz. I think you’re supposed to get into a bed somewhere and let the professionals handle it. Cops, lawyers-that’s what these people do.”

If we were in the room together, he’d put a hand on my shoulder or usher me to a chair somewhere. I imagined him running a big hand through his thick, dark hair. I wished I was looking into the warmth of his dark eyes, noticing he needed a shave, feeling relaxed and calmed by his presence. Instead I stared at the harsh beauty of the woman still on my screen and felt something akin to indigestion, some acidic brew of anger and fear.

“I can’t do that. I’ve already given too much power away. He stole from me. He hurt my family. He’s not going to stroll off, with the police always just behind chasing warrants and following leads. No.”

Jack issued the exasperated sigh that I’ve heard often in our relationship, a kind of tired blowing out of his lips. He regarded me as generally pig-headed and stubborn and had said so many times-during contract negotiations, with editorial matters, regarding women he’d dated whom I found wanting, or where to have lunch.

“So now what?” His voice had raised an octave in concern. “You’re on the run from the police? This is not good. We need to rethink this.”

“I’m not ‘on the run.’ I didn’t do anything. I’m just trying to figure out what’s happened here, to fix all the damage. So, are you going to give me my money or what?”

“Am I aiding and abetting you right now?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I repeated.

“But if asked by the police, I’m supposed to say you haven’t contacted me and I don’t know where you are?”

“I haven’t. You called me,” I said. “And you don’t know where I am.”

There was silence on the line. “Okay. I’ll get you some cash.”

“I’ll find you later.” I was about to end the call but I heard his voice and put the phone back to my ear.

“I wish I could say I was surprised that this guy turned out to be a disaster,” he was saying. “I never liked him.”

“This guy? He’s my husband of five years.”

“I know. I never liked him,” he said, sounding grave. “Seriously.”

“You never said so.”

“You never asked.”

“Still.”

“I was trying to be supportive. I could see that… you loved him.” There was a strange pitch to his voice, something I hadn’t heard before. And in that moment I realized: He did remember.

“Jack.”

“Just please be careful.”

AFTER I’D FINISHED with Jack, I wrote down the number on the screen. But rather than dialing, I searched the online reverse directory and got an address in Queens. I wrote that down as well. It took all the strength I had to stop looking at my dirty-hot assailant. But I felt a clock ticking, knowing that the longer I was here, the more likely whoever might be looking for me-police or otherwise-would catch up.

I logged on to my Web site e-mail account and searched the trash folder, which I’d never emptied. The second of the two e-mails I’d received was still there; the first one was gone. I knew that the trash folder automatically purged after a week. I stared at the message, the cursor bar blinking blue over it. The name in the “from” field was Camilla Novak. The subject line read: Your husband…

The text in the body read:

Your husband is a liar and a murderer. The past is about to catch up with him. And you need to save yourself. You’re in great danger. Please call me.

She ended with her name and a phone number.

Even reading it now, I can see why I deleted it. It was so overwrought, so silly. A week ago, I would have imagined it spam, on par with all those e-mails announcing that I’d won some European lottery, or that someone who’d had a crush on me in high school was looking for me. My box was always full of this kind of garbage. They were lures, looking for the most gullible, loneliest, most paranoid fish in the pond. I deleted mercilessly. Too bad I didn’t have such good judgment in the real world.

I hesitated just a moment and then dialed the number on the screen from my cell phone. It rang so long, I didn’t think anyone would pick up. Then there was a very sultry female voice on the line.

“Hello?”

I found I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I hesitated, almost hung up.

“Hello?” she said again.

Finally, I found my voice: “It’s Isabel Raine.”

There was only silence on the line where I heard her breathing.

“You wrote to me about my husband,” I went on. “You said he was a murderer and a liar. That I was in danger.” I sounded amazingly cool and distant, my voice not betraying the adrenaline pulsing through my veins.

Still silence. Then: “I made a mistake. I lied. I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t. You need to tell me the truth.”

“It’s too late. It’s too late.” I heard a buzzer ring on her end. “I have to go. Don’t call again.”

She hung up, and I immediately called her back. My call went straight to voice mail.

“I know about your boyfriend, about the real Marcus Raine. What happened to him? You have to help me.” But I was talking to air.

I quickly found a local listing for Camilla Novak online, wrote down the address and phone number, hoping it was the right person. The listing was in SoHo, not too far from where I was now. Then I Googled: “marcus raine missing nyc.” I wanted more details. I needed to arm myself with information before I raced into the fray.

A list of matches filled the screen and I scrolled through old newspaper articles, which didn’t offer any new information beyond what I’d already learned from Detective Crowe. The rest were inaccurate links: Another Marcus Raine was looking for a girlfriend on a dating site, someone named Marcus who lived on Raine Street was selling a mattress, an old man left his dog Marcus out in the rain (misspelled raine) and wrote a ridiculous poem about it.

I was about to move on when a listing toward the bottom of the page caught my eye: What happened to Marcus Raine? I clicked on the link and it brought me to a site called forgottennycrimes.com.

“On television, the haunted cop works the case until he retires-and even then he can’t let it go. But in the real world, people disappear and no one ever finds out what happened to them,” some copy on the makeshift page read. “Someone goes out for groceries and never comes home, is never heard from again. Everyone moves on except for those of us who are left behind, haunted by loss, anger, and unanswered questions.”

Grainy images faded in and then faded out on the screen-school portraits, mug shots, vacation shots, candid and posed images.

I clicked on Marcus Raine’s name and saw the same image Crowe had shown me, except that the girlfriend had been cropped out. The blurb there, about how Raine was living the American dream when he disappeared, how he’d been raised by his aunt in communist Czechoslovakia, how his parents died, how he came to the U.S. and was educated, got rich, was my husband’s story exactly.

Camilla Novak, another émigré from the Czech Republic, thought he was acting oddly in the weeks before his death. He seemed paranoid, installing several new locks on the door, refusing to answer his phone unless she called him by coded ring, phoning once, hanging up, and calling again. “He believed he was being watched. But he wouldn’t say by whom or why. I was worried; mental illness ran in his family,” Novak said. “But I never thought he was really in danger.”

There was a phone number on the site, too. If you have any information, call 1-21-COLD-CASE.

On a whim, I entered the name Kristof Ragan into the search engine. But nothing useful appeared, just lists of names for schools and corporations that included “Kristof” or “Ragan.” I kept looking through page after page on the screen, just hoping, becoming more desperate with each bad link. Finally, I reached the end. And that’s when I lost it for the first time.

In my nephew’s bedroom, surrounded by Star Wars and Skater Boy paraphernalia, stuffed animals and sports posters-walls, ceilings covered with it all-bunk beds the size of apartments I’d had, I put my head on his desk and wept, feeling all my rage, confusion, and grief pour out of me in one mighty rush. I could have drowned in it. Two days ago, I would have turned to my imperfect husband for his intellect and calm in such a storm. I would have reached for him and he would have lifted me from the chaos of my emotions.

“Isabel, relax,” he’d say. “Clear your head.”

And I’d feel that fog-the one that descends over me in time of stress or high emotion, the one that inhibits logical thought-I’d feel it start to lift.

“There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution. There’s always a way,” he’d tell me. And I’d listen, know he was right.

I felt his loss so profoundly that I almost just crawled into Trevor’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. My friend, my husband, my lover was a liar at least, quite possibly a criminal as well. But still the thought of being without him nearly crippled me. For all the fractures in our marriage, all the things that caused me pain, I truly loved him, had the most basic kind of faith in him, even if I’d never really trusted him again after his affair.

For some reason, I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Detective Crowe. And love forgives? he’d asked bitterly. Love accepts, moves forward, I’d answered him. But maybe, in my case, love accepts too much, wants to live so badly that it creates what it needs to survive.

Next to the computer keyboard my cell phone vibrated, started shimmying along the smooth white surface of the desk. I looked at the little screen. Erik calling. I hesitated, then answered it but didn’t say anything.

“Don’t do this, Iz,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Just come back and we’ll work it out together.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or at least go to the lawyer’s office. You know where he is, right? John Brace and Son, on Park Avenue. He’ll know what to do. That detective said if we can’t get you to come back, he’s going to consider you a person of interest in all of this. A suspect, Iz. Let’s not have this get any worse than it already is.”

I pressed the End button on my phone and set it back down. It started buzzing again a second later. Linda calling. I let it shimmy itself off the desk and fall to the floor. Eventually it stopped ringing.

As I got up and walked away from it, it started buzzing again. That little phone, the fat silver weight of it, smooth and warm like a worry stone, had always been a source of comfort to me. Seemed like it was always in my hand, all the people in my life just one push button away. All those voices-my sister, my mother, my husband-at least as loud as my own, often louder. I left them all there calling after me.

I took an old coat from my sister’s closet and I was about to leave when I had a thought. I ran to the room Erik used as an office and went into their file cabinet, which I knew they left unlocked. It was easy to find their passports-and mine among them. Linda and I had traveled with the kids last summer, an impromptu trip to Mexico. In the melee of traveling with two kids, our passports got confused. I had Linda’s at my apartment, or did. She had mine. I grabbed it with a wash of relief and euphoria. I thought that sometimes fate smiled on you, even when she had been slapping you around in every other way like the abusive, narcissistic bitch she is.

GRADY CROWE HATED hospitals-not that anyone liked them especially. But he didn’t dislike them for the same reasons as other people. He hadn’t watched anyone die in a hospital; he didn’t feel uncomfortable around sick people. It didn’t remind him of his own mortality.

He just didn’t like the lighting, the stale decor, or the smell of an institutional kitchen. These things offended his aesthetic sensibilities, made him anxious and uncomfortable. And it annoyed him that people suffering from disease weren’t treated to a more pleasant environment. Wouldn’t it help them to feel better if they didn’t have to look at gray Formica and dirty white walls, if they didn’t have to look at themselves beneath the ugly glare of fluorescent lighting? And if their last days had to be spent here, shouldn’t a little more attention be paid to detail? Should the last thing they see be peeling wallpaper or a metal bed rail? Then again, maybe not everyone was as affected by these things as he was.

His phone rang.

“She’s moving,” Jez said on the other end. He heard a siren wailing in the background and she sounded a bit breathless.

“Are you on foot?” he asked.

“I am now. She took a cab to her sister’s apartment. I’ve been sitting here, waiting. She just left on foot, moving fast. I thought she’d hail another cab but she didn’t.”

“Where’s the vehicle?”

“Parked illegally across the street from the Books’ building.”

“Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know,” she said, drawing out the words as if she was talking to a toddler. “That’s why I’m following her.”

“Keep me posted,” he said, glancing up at Linda Book, then over to the two kids who both seemed pretty bored or unhappy or both. He’d been asking them questions in the family waiting area, getting nowhere.

“Where are you going?” Jez asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you keep me posted, too.”

In the first smart move he’d made in twenty-four hours, he had left Jez outside the hospital while he went inside. He couldn’t hold Isabel Raine; he knew he had no legal reason to do so. But one of them could stay on her, see where she went. Maybe she’d lead them to her husband. Maybe they’d see someone following her, like the alleged thugs who’d nearly killed her stepfather.

Isabel Raine was a runner. Not that he thought she was guilty necessarily, but she had an idea of herself that made her a flight risk. She was angry, she was arrogant, and she’d been betrayed. And she was looking for answers, thought she was better qualified than anyone to find them. She didn’t disappoint him, took the first opportunity she had to bolt. But, he’d noted, she’d waited until she knew her stepfather was okay, knew that he had family nearby, before she left. To him it said that she was a good girl at her core, if not a rule follower. Her staying when she could have more easily left was what they called in the business a telling detail. Not in the police business, in the writing business. The little quirk that spoke volumes about character.

He’d read this in one of the myriad books he’d read about fiction writing. It had stayed with him. He thought it was something that made sense in real life, too, in police work. The two professions weren’t really so different. You had to have the belly of fire, that drive to know and solve and speculate, to follow your hunches and go where incident and evidence impelled you. You had to have a terrible curiosity about character, about what made people do the awful, wonderful, terrifying, brilliant things they do.

He looked up at Linda Book, who was watching him.

“She went to your apartment.”

Linda nodded, as if this didn’t surprise her. “She has a key.”

She stood by the window, leaned against the sill and looked out, her arms wrapped tight around her body. He noticed that the skin on her hands was creamy white, her nails short, sensible squares. She wore a honker of a diamond, cushion cut, a carat and a half at least. She clenched and unclenched this hand unconsciously, squeezing the thick cashmere of her coat. He could tell it was cashmere, had always been good about identifying fine fabrics by sight or touch.

The way the light came in from the window, the golden light of afternoon, it caught the highlights of her hair. In the line of her nose and something about her brow, he saw Isabel Raine. It was easy to see they were sisters, though they had opposite coloring. Isabel Raine looked like she’d been dipped in milk. Linda Book was gilded by sunlight. They were both beautiful, but Linda Book was softer, more real somehow. It was the mother factor. There was a look to a certain type of mom, a compassionate knowledge of the human condition that can only come from changing diapers and soothing tantrums, bandaging knees and assuaging fears.

“Where will she go, Ms. Book?”

“Wherever she thinks the answers are,” she said, looking out the window again. He felt a wash of frustration. Stubborn stoicism must run in the family.

“You’re not helping her,” he said. “You’re not protecting her.”

“I’ve never been able to do either of those things, Detective. Never. Not unless she wants me to.” He watched her eyes drift over to her daughter, a tiny dark-haired girl who slumped in an uncomfortable chair, pretending to be asleep. “If I knew where she was going, I’d tell you.”

His phone rang again. He saw it was Jez, so he answered quickly.

“I lost her,” she said, yelling over street noise.

“What? How?” he said sharply, causing both Linda and the girl to look at him.

“I got caught in the crowd pushing out of the train and she snaked in. The doors closed and she was gone.”

“What train?”

“The uptown N/R.”

“Fuck me.”

Linda Book shot him an annoyed look, shook her head. The girl smiled, a small, amused turning up of the corner of her mouth. And in that second she was identical to her aunt. Detective Crowe was really starting to dislike this family of stubborn, too-smart women with bad attitudes.

“What are you going to do?” he asked her, sounding a little petulant even to himself.

“What can I do, Crowe?”

“See if you can catch her at the next station.” He heard her release an exasperated breath.

“Okay.” She said it as if he was an idiot and it would never work but she’d try it anyway. He ended the call. If he’d been alone, he’d have kicked something, issued a string of expletives to blow off steam. But he managed to keep his composure.

“I have an idea.” It was the girl, looking at him as if he might be interested in her thoughts.

“Really,” he said, sarcastic and annoyed. He saw anger, anger rather than intimidation, flash on her small face. He hated to admit it, but it cowed him a bit. He kept his eyes on her. She turned to her mother, as if he no longer deserved to be spoken to.

“Make Daddy go home and check the computer,” she said. “You can use the spyware you installed to see what sites she visited and try to figure out where she went that way.”

“What spyware?” asked Linda, widening her eyes and lifting her brow in a bad imitation of innocence.

“Yeah, right,” said Emily. “Like we don’t know, Mom.”

“Hey, that’s a good idea, kid,” he said, surprised.

Emily Book gave him a nasty smirk. “Duh.”

Five minutes later Erik Book was on his way downtown. Linda Book looked uneasy, rubbed her temples with the spread thumb and index finger of one hand, as though she was wondering if she was helping or hurting her sister.

WHEN THEY WERE girls, before their father died-because after that neither of them were ever girls again-everyone thought of Izzy as the difficult one. If Izzy had been first, Margie famously told everyone, there wouldn’t have been two. She was the one with colic, the bad sleeper, the finicky eater, the one who never napped. It had been said so many times that it became a kind of family legacy.

But Linda knew the truth. Izzy was wild, yes, where Linda was obedient. Izzy was outspoken where Linda was quiet. Izzy was honest where Linda was tactful. All these things added up to make Linda seem like the angel and Izzy the rebel. But as for who was the good girl, and who was the bad, Linda knew the truth.

She watched Emily now and saw the same pure soul she knew existed in her sister. In Trevor she saw the same conviction that good would always triumph over evil, a belief fueled by the mythologies of his comics and the legends of Star Wars, that there was a clear right and wrong in every situation. He sulked over by the doorway, battling his conscience and the nagging feeling she knew he had that following the rules in this case might not have been that right thing. He looked confused. She wanted to tell him that he was only going to get more confused as time went on, that things would never be as clear as they were right now. She’d been like him once, so righteous and sure. Poor Fred could attest to her punishing standards. She wanted to tell her son that it was all just shades of gray. But that was a lesson for another day.

“You did good, Trev,” she said to comfort him. “Izzy needs our help right now, even if she doesn’t know it.”

Her son nodded uncertainly, wrapped his arms tightly around his thin middle. Emily gave Trevor a dirty look.

“Tattletale,” she hissed. “What a baby.”

“Shut up,” he said, his voice rising high and breaking. “It was your idea to check the spyware.”

“Emily, give me a break,” Linda said.

“What?” she said. “He is.”

They started yelling, speaking over each other unintelligibly. They always did this, reacted to stress by fighting with each other. The sound of it was maddening.

“That’s enough,” Linda said, raising her voice. They both stopped and stared at her, mouths in wide, surprised O’s. Emily returned to her seat and flopped herself down dramatically. Trevor went back to his corner to sulk.

“I need some quiet,” she said more softly. “Please. I have to think.”

She wanted to be angry with her sister for bolting again. But she couldn’t, the same way you couldn’t be mad at a cat for scratching furniture or a dog for chewing up your shoes. Isabel was just being Isabel.

There was an experiment Linda had read about, where people were asked to deliver electric shocks to a person seated in another room out of sight. The experiment revealed that most people would keep delivering the shocks, no matter how loud and tortured the screams from the other room became, as long as someone in authority told them to do it. Linda knew that she’d be one of those people. She’d be racked with guilt and self-doubt, but she’d keep pressing that button until someone told her it was time to stop.

Izzy would be the one who stood up and protested, who bucked authority. She’d beat the crap out of the person delivering orders and then race to rescue the injured. And in some circles, this would make her a bad seed, an undesirable.

Until her affair with Ben, Linda had never broken a rule in her life. And she’d been brutally judgmental of people who in her opinion had. She tortured Margie and Fred for years, because to her it seemed that Margie should have kept her vows to her husband, even in death. And, of course, her father had been the ultimate rule breaker. He’d defied the strictest rules of all: Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Love me forever, Daddy. And how she’d hated him for it. It took years of therapy for her to come to this realization.

Even in her art she never took risks, followed the rules of convention, the typical ideas about what comprised a beautiful image. And how she’d been praised for it, lauded and paid ridiculous sums for art and journalistic photographs that she secretly believed were common, maudlin-as Ben had reviewed her-or appealing to a base and silly chicken soup sentimentality.

Reflexively she dialed Izzy’s number and was surprised when her own husband answered.

“Hey,” he said. Even in that one word, she heard all his shame and despair. She ignored it, could not deal with his emotions or what he’d done to their life. In her mind, financial infidelity was a more egregious betrayal than a sexual one. She honestly didn’t know what the future held for them, but for the time being, she couldn’t think about it. She’d forgiven him before he’d even confessed; she’d meant it, too. But that didn’t mean she didn’t hate him at the moment.

“You found her,” she said, feeling the flood of relief. She felt both Emily’s and Trevor’s eyes on her.

“Uh, no. She left her phone. I found it on the floor of Trevor’s room.”

“Oh, God.” She shook her head at the kids, and both of them seemed to slump in disappointment. Izzy had dropped the line that connected them, gone off the grid. This terrified Linda more than anything else.

“I’ll find her. I promise,” he said. She could hear how badly he wanted to do that, to be the hero here. “She Googled someone named Camilla Novak. Do you know who that is?”

She searched the memory banks of her rattled brain. “No,” she said finally.

“There’s an address in SoHo, not far from here.”

Linda rummaged through her bag and found a capless Bic pen and a receipt from the coffee shop where she’d fucked Ben just hours before. It reminded her that they both had a lot to regret.

“Give it to me,” she said, her tone harder, less yielding than she intended. She just couldn’t help her anger, couldn’t keep from expressing it. She scribbled down the address, wondering aloud to Erik why Izzy had taken the uptown N/R.

“I don’t know. But she also looked up someone named Kristof Ragan. Ring any bells?”

“No.”

She wrote the name down. “Anything else?”

“She went to some site called Services Unlimited. It looks like an escort service masked as temp services. Weird.”

“Why would she go to a site like that?”

“No idea.”

“Anything else?”

“Just American Express. She was probably trying to track charges.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. Hey, are you going to give that to the detective?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay,” he said, then he paused and issued a sharp breath. “Just give me a head start. If I can get to her first, maybe I can convince her to turn herself in to the lawyer. We don’t want her taken into custody, right? She’s been through enough.”

The detective returned to the room then with sodas for the kids and a coffee for her. She thought he wore too much cologne; it made her sinuses ache.

“Okay,” she said. “Give me a call back when you find something.”

She ended the call and stuffed the paper in her bag. She looked at the detective, offered him a grateful smile for the coffee he handed her. “He’s checking the computer now. He’s going to call right back.”

The detective nodded. “Okay,” he said, handing her a card. “Call me on my cell if he finds anything.”

“Where are you going”?

“I have a lead I want to follow up.”

They stared at each other and in that moment it was hard to keep what she knew from him, an authority figure. He’d been open with her, told her everything he’d learned about Izzy’s husband. She felt guilty, nervous for keeping things from him, even if it was only to give Erik a head start so that he might talk some sense into her crazy sister. She was glad when he moved toward the door.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. He paused with the knob in his hand and turned back to look at her. “Did you ever suspect that your brother-in-law wasn’t who he said he was? Was there ever anything that gave you pause, something that’s coming back to you now?”

She’d thought about it since he’d told her everything, about the missing man, the stolen identity. But other than the nebulous feeling she’d had that she didn’t care for him or trust him and didn’t think he was good enough for Izzy no, there was nothing, no clue that might help them now. She told him as much.

“Just think about it. Let me know if anything comes to mind. No matter how small or inconsequential it might seem.”

Then: “Does the name Camilla Novak mean anything to you?”

She couldn’t hold his eyes, dropped her gaze to the floor. “No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”

He let a beat pass. Then: “You sure?”

She nodded and forced herself to meet his eyes with a wide, earnest gaze. “Why? Who is she?”

“Someone who might have information. We’ll see. Call me,” he said, and then left the room.

“Did you just lie?” Emily asked, incredulous. Linda considered lying again but didn’t have the heart, not with both of them staring at her like that.

“Shh,” Linda said, moving over and sitting next to her daughter, dropping an arm around her shoulders. Her little girl felt so thin, so fragile.

“You lied to the police?” Trevor said, his voice high with anguish, looking like he did the day she had to break it to him about Santa.

“I’m just giving Dad a head start,” she whispered, glancing over at the door. She moved over to him and put both her hands on his thin shoulders. “We want to find Isabel before the police do.”

“I thought you said I did the right thing.”

“God, stop whining for once,” said Emily.

“You did” said Linda. “You did do the right thing. But this is the right thing, too. In a different way.”

It was nothing but shades of gray, she wanted to tell him, none of it black and white. But instead she opened her free arm to him and he came and sat on her lap; he wasn’t too big for that. Emily rested her head on Linda’s shoulder and she took her brother’s hand and squeezed. They could be so mean to each other, scream and whine to beat the band, but Linda knew they shared the same ferocious love that she and Izzy did. And now, with foundations shifting, and life as they knew it crashing around them-in ways they weren’t yet aware-they’d have this. They’d always have this.

12

He felt an acute annoyance as she bled out, died slowly. Her eyelids fluttered quickly, butterfly wings of panic and resistance. There was a hopeless rattle to her breath. He looked away when he saw her hand start to twitch, her eyes go blank. His annoyance resided at first in the back of his throat, then became an ache just above his brow line.

A slow unraveling occurs when one thread separates from the fabric; it can’t help but catch on something. One tiny pull, then another, and eventually the whole garment comes apart. He’d broken the first rule he’d set for himself: Leave at the first sign of trouble; cut your losses, take what you can, and change that garment before you’re left half naked in the cold. It was attachment and arrogance that brought him to this place. Sara’s earlier admonition rang in his ears.

He moved over to the couch and sat, put his chin on one fist, watched her. There was a time when he thought he could love her. But when she’d given herself to him so easily and served her purpose, his passion for her cooled quickly.

HE’D MET MARCUS Raine at Red Gravity, where they were both programmers. Though they’d been raised in the same country, just miles apart, Marcus Raine didn’t want to be friends-not with his fellow countryman, not with anyone. Their colleagues laughed about Raine behind his back, joked that he just powered down at the end of the day, sat slumped at his desk until morning. He was there when everyone arrived, there when they left in the evenings. He seemed to have five sets of nearly identical outfits-black pants and Rockport shoes, button-down shirts in some shade of brown or gray. The receptionist took notes-brown on Monday, charcoal on Tuesday, slate on Wednesday, chocolate on Thursday, gunmetal on Friday. He didn’t often acknowledge the weather, wore the same three-quarter-length lightweight black jacket, rain or shine, summer or winter. Sometimes he wore a stocking cap when it was very, very cold. Sometimes, in the blistering heat, he didn’t wear the jacket at all.

He didn’t join in the laughter. He was only slightly more sociable than Marcus Raine. But even this was design, part of his invisibility. Friendly enough not to stand apart but never intimate, never revealing. As a result, he was fairly certain that none of his Red Gravity colleagues would even remember his name. Sometimes he forgot it, too, would go days without thinking of himself even with the name his mother had given him. Now, after so many years, the name Kristof Ragan seemed to belong to someone else, someone who’d lived a meaningless life and been forgotten.

Beneath their jokes about Marcus Raine was a current of resentment. Marcus had been hired early, before any of them. He’d been paid a very low salary and given a large number of company shares to make up for it. When the company went public, Raine became a very rich man. The company rewarded his loyalty and hard work by raising his salary on top of it. Rumor had it-and in a small company there were always rumors-he made nearly as much as the CEO. But he didn’t begrudge Marcus Raine his success; it didn’t make him angry or jealous. It made him curious. What was it like to be Marcus Raine?

Isabel got a certain look on her face when she was working-and she didn’t have to be sitting at her computer to be working. It was a faraway glaze to her eyes, a kind of thoughtful cock to her head. He could almost see synapses firing in her brain as it struggled to know. It was a place she went to imagine, to understand, to be something that she wasn’t so that she could write it. He found it fascinating but not foreign. He had the same drives, the same desires for very different reasons. He’d had them all his life.

It was Camilla, Raine’s girlfriend, who impelled him to action. Raine, apparently, had forgotten his lunch. He brought the same lunch every day. Some type of meat on whole wheat bread and an apple. He drank water from the cooler, in a cup he kept in his desk and washed in the break-room sink when he was done. He was so precise, like an old clock, so predictable and self-contained. He never could have imagined Raine with a woman like Camilla. She breezed into the office, wearing a flouncy, printed dress, extraordinarily lean, delicately muscular, outstanding legs ending in dangerously high heels-red. She had an electrifying energy, white-blond hair, a voice that sounded like a singing bird to him.

“Can I just leave this for Marcus Raine?” she asked, holding up a brown bag.

“Oh, I’ll call him,” the receptionist said with unmasked enthusiasm. She wanted to see him interact with his girlfriend. “Can I give him your name?”

She hesitated, looked around. “Camilla,” she said finally.

The reception desk stood directly in front of the door; behind that was the field of cubicles where everyone sat. One by one, people found a reason to look over the walls, like prairie dogs popping quick, curious heads up from their holes. From where he sat, he had an unobstructed view as Marcus Raine strode up to the front and took the bag from her hand. He watched Camilla’s face brighten at the sight of him. Her smile widened-no, deepened-as Raine wound a strong arm around her waist and kissed her. He whispered something to her in Czech and she laughed, a tinkling, musical sound like ice in a glass.

Suddenly Marcus Raine didn’t seem so laughable. He watched the faces of their colleagues, mocking smiles dropping in surprise, resentment waxing like a moon, cold and hard.

HE HADN’T THOUGHT about the way he met Camilla in a long time, about the desire he’d had from the first moment he saw her. It was different from the desire he’d had for Isabel, which was cooler, more intellectual. His love for Isabel connected him to the higher parts of himself, the better man inside. His hunger for Camilla had been primal, a raptor ripping meat from a carcass on the jungle floor.

He saw her again later in the week. This time it was no accident. He worked at his station until he saw the top of Raine’s head float by his cube. He quickly gathered his things and ran down the stairs while the old elevator slowly carried Raine toward the street. He arrived on the ground floor just in time to see the other man exit through the glass doors onto Canal Street. It was summer, still light at nearly eight P.M.

The humidity in the air raised an instant sheen of sweat on his brow. From a distance, he followed Raine through the chaos of the busy street, beside the garish electronics shops, just gaping holes in buildings, loud with booming speakers, and stands loaded with knockoff bags, the air smelling of exhaust and crispy duck.

Camilla, resplendent in shades of blue, a simple blouse and flowing skirt, flippy sandals on her feet, was waiting for Raine by the subway station. She was like a breeze of clean air in the filth of the city around her. Raine kissed her quickly and together they descended below the street.

He rode between two cars and watched the couple through the thick, dirty window that separated them. They were oblivious, totally wrapped up in each other, one of Raine’s arms around her shoulder, the other holding her delicate hand. She looked up at him with that wide-open smile. Raine seemed like a different person, animated, laughing, relaxed, not like the gargoyle he usually was, staring joylessly at his screen, skulking over his sandwich in the break room, grunting his replies to questions, issuing terse one-line e-mails. To look into Camilla’s face, you’d imagine he was the most charming, charismatic bastard who ever walked the face of the earth.

When they exited uptown, he followed them again, watched as they entered a beautiful prewar building on the Upper West Side. A doorman in a navy blue uniform pulled the door open for them, and they disappeared. Left behind on the street, a terrible current of covetousness rushed through him. It literally caused him to feel nauseous when he thought of the hovel he lived in out in Williamsburg, shared with his disgusting slob of a brother. Even earning the kind of money that would make him a king at home, he lived like a pauper in this whore of a city, where everything he’d ever wanted was right in front him but always out of reach.

He’d learned quickly that the only certain way to succeed in this country was as a thief. The wealthy Americans of everyone’s dreams hadn’t worked their way to the top, hadn’t gone from rags to riches through hard work and good morals, as they would have everyone believe. The wealthiest had either gotten lucky-like Marcus Raine-or gone crooked, stolen and cheated and killed to earn their riches. They were pirates. This didn’t make him angry. It made him hungry. It made him creative.

Ivan, unlike Marcus, had had no interest in getting an education and a job, had already aligned himself with an unsavory element. Almost as soon as they arrived, Ivan connected with two brothers who ran with the Albanian mob. Their crimes were petty-ATM heists, transporting Albanian girls who thought they were going to be models and wound up addicted to meth, wrapping their lithe bodies around poles in filthy strip bars. But Ivan was making more money-much more-even though he had a limited intelligence, wasn’t much more than a child in some ways. Ivan was always the one who treated at clubs and dinners out.

On the long ride home to Brooklyn, he’d thought about why he’d come to this country, what he’d hoped to accomplish here. He didn’t want to be a paycheck player, someone who lived by another man’s rules. He hadn’t imagined himself a slave to a company, asking permission to take time off for sickness, his only free hours squeezed in between grueling work days and the two weeks a year he was allotted for holiday. Suddenly, it seemed to him that Ivan, whom he’d always regarded as slow and essentially lazy, had been right all along.

When he got back to their apartment, Ivan was lying on the couch surrounded by a field of fast-food wrappers. He’d unapologetically unbuttoned his pants to allow his belly to expand and was staring blankly at the television set. Ivan breathed heavily, evenly, like someone sleeping though he was obviously awake. He lifted a hand in greeting.

“Ivan,” he said, closing the door loudly behind him and placing his laptop bag on the floor near his brother’s feet. The place was a hovel-a couch they’d rescued from the curb, an old table with two plastic chairs, futons for beds. Sheets acted as curtains. The place hadn’t been cleaned since the last time he’d lost his patience with the filth, about a month earlier. But he didn’t care about that at the moment. “I’ve been thinking.”

“What have you been thinking?” Ivan asked apathetically. The massive Sony television and surrounding equipment-a PlayStation, audio system and speakers, DVD player-filled the far wall. Ivan might not shower for days, but he took his audiovisual very seriously. Where all the equipment had come from a few weeks earlier, whether bought or stolen, he didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

He told his brother about Marcus Raine, about the ideas he’d had. Ivan had a good laugh. “All these years I’ve been saying that you work too hard for too little. What finally changes your mind? Just one pretty girl?”

He couldn’t say what had changed his mind. At the time, he thought it was Camilla, the force of his desire for her. But, no. It was as if he’d lost the will to keep swimming against the current of his life. He’d just stopped kicking, stopped stroking, and let the flow take him. Ivan had a good laugh, patted him on the back, and congratulated him on seeing things as they were. And then they got to work. It seemed like so long ago. It was. A lifetime. He was a different man with a different name then.

CAMILLA WAS BEAUTIFUL even in death. He stood over her still body and remembered how warm her skin had been, how wet she always was for him. He imagined that she’d sensed his evil and, instead of repelling her, it excited her. He’d been wrong about that, though. When she saw him, really understood what he was, she’d turned against him.

He crouched down and pushed back the collar of her white shirt and saw the lace of her bra over the swell of her perfect breast. French and Italian women were always lauded for their sensual beauty. But Czech women, with their fine, hard features and their slim, long bodies, went unmentioned. Maybe it was their apparent lack of warmth, the unyielding quality of their aura-like Prague itself. Compared to Prague, Paris paled. But Prague was a side trip, somewhere Americans might spend a few days on their European tour. No one dreamed of Prague the way they did Paris. Paris glittered and danced for her audience, had already lifted her skirts and offered her treasures to the world. Prague still stood in the wings, holding herself aloof, offering nothing but coy glimpses of her perfection.

“I should have killed you long ago,” he whispered.

Then the buzzer rang, the sound startling him so badly, he felt as if he’d been jolted by an electric shock. He froze in his crouch by the body, and felt every breath he took until the buzzer rang again. Then there was silence and he waited. He heard a few buzzers ringing in other apartments. Whoever was down there was hoping someone would just open the door, maybe expecting a delivery or a maid. And then he heard the sound of the door unlocking, opening quickly and then slamming, the sound carrying up the stairwell. And then it was quiet. It was quiet for so long, he started to relax.

When the knob started to turn, he remembered too late that he hadn’t locked it behind him.

13

As soon as I exited my sister’s apartment, I saw her. She sat in an unmarked Caprice across the street, trying to hide behind a newspaper. But I recognized Jesamyn Breslow by the blond crown of her head, saw a flash of her face as she flipped the page of the newspaper. That’s why it had been so easy for me to get away. They wanted me to, thinking I might lead them to my husband.

I wanted to walk over and pound on her window, rage at her for following me when they should be doing some police work of their own. Tell her that I didn’t know any more than they did and was following the pathetic leads they unwittingly gave me. But instead I headed to the N/R station on Prince Street. I heard the car door slam and knew she had gotten out and was following me on foot. I walked fast, eventually ducking into the station.

A quick glance showed that she was still behind me. She was trying to hang back, still hiding behind that newspaper. I managed to lose her by squeezing onto a crowded uptown train. I took it one stop to Astor Place and then took the next train back downtown. I walked to Camilla Novak’s building on West Broadway and Broome Street. I’d always loved SoHo, something so grand and yet terminally hip about it, somehow swank and grunge at the same time-the galleries and upscale shops with huge picture windows representing outrageous rents, narrow residential buildings, tony cafés, only the very coolest bars and restaurants. Once known as the Cast Iron District, SoHo boasted huge historic buildings with gigantic windows and upper floors that were wide-open loft spaces, appealing to artists because of the square footage, natural light, and cheap rents. They moved into the spaces illegally in the 1970s, ignoring the city zoning at the time, but the depressed city was too embroiled in its other messes-rampant crime, a shattered economy-to care.

Most people didn’t realize that more than 250 buildings were made with cast iron. Architects found cast iron to be cheap, could be fashioned into the most intricate design patterns, and was easily repaired. It was also the strength and pliability of this metal that allowed for the carving of magnificent frames and the tall windows so beloved by artists. Unfortunately, when exposed to heat, cast iron buckled. Steel brought a rapid end to the use of cast iron. I know all of this because of Jack, the original New York City geek.

When I came to the address I’d written down, I rang the buzzer hard, a few times. Novak, 4A was scrawled on her mailbox; otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what buzzer to push. I realized that this was the reason they (the ubiquitous they with all their cautionary tales) told you not to put your last name beside the buzzer at the street door.

But there wasn’t any answer. I didn’t have any reason to believe that she’d been here when I talked to her; I might have reached her on her cell phone. And if she had been here, maybe she’d left afraid that I’d do exactly what I’d done, look her up on the Web and show up at her door. She’d wanted to talk to me once. Why had she changed her mind?

I rang the buzzer again. When there was still no answer, I started ringing other buzzers in the building, hoping someone would just let me in. I had no clear idea what I would do if I had gained admittance. I was just operating on a kind of autopilot, moving forward on instinct with little planning and no visibility beyond the present tense.

I was about to give up when a voice carried over the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Camilla,” I lied. “I forgot my keys.”

“Again?” crackled an elderly voice. “I’m not letting you in next time.”

I heard the door unlock and I pushed my way into the foyer. Black and white tile beneath my feet, cool concrete walls, milky light washing in from a window on the first landing. Now what, genius? I thought, pushing through the second door.

I peered up the staircase. I could hear the sound of a cat mewing, the frenzy of a game show on someone’s television. Somewhere in the building a baby was crying. As I started up the stairs, I patted my bag for my cell phone, on reflex wanting to call my sister. But it was gone, I remembered. I’d left it behind. I felt suddenly as if I was alone in the dark without a flashlight. In the woods, feeling my way.

On the fourth floor, I paused, then walked slowly in the grainy light filtering in from a frosted, double-paned window at the end of the hallway. 4A was the first door on the right. I looked at it; someone had painted it recently, a glossy black compared to the dull gray of the others on the floor. What would I do? Knock? Listen at the door? I almost turned around and left, almost took Erik’s advice and headed uptown to the lawyer’s office. Instead I put my hand on the knob and, against all better judgment, turned it and found the door unlocked. This, I knew, was not a good thing.

The rules dictated a hasty retreat, a return to the fold. Like my nephew, I could suddenly see five moves ahead and know that I was out of my depth. And yet I kept moving, pushing the door, heading inside the apartment like a lemming to the precipice.

Inside, the lighting was dim, all the shades drawn. I heard the ringing of a cellular phone, light and musical. It stopped. Then, a second later, it started ringing again. I stayed rooted in the door frame, my hand still on the knob. Finally, I stepped through onto the hardwood floor.

“Hello?” I said. “Camilla?”

The phone had stopped ringing, and muffled street noise was the only sound I heard. The apartment was tidy, with simple inexpensive furnishing-a matching beige overstuffed couch and chair, a low coffee table, an older television on a stand by the window. A large Oriental rug on the floor, some cheaply framed posters, a gray throw blanket over a footstool. The phone started ringing again. I could see it came from a handbag, which lay on the couch next to a coat.

I moved toward the sound. That’s when I saw her lying on the floor, legs folded demurely to one side, blood spilling an angry red on the floor, on her clothes, sprayed on the white wall. Her impossibly white throat bore a deep gash so dark, so hideous, it almost seemed fake. She was dressed in white jeans, a tight white blouse, now marred with gore.

There was a thick thud within my center, a tingling at the wound in my head that spread across the top of my skull and traveled down my spine. I tried to take in the details of the scene, to process what was before me. But the whole room was shifting and tilting. I was only aware of a terrible nausea, a desire to get away. Then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

“Isabel. Don’t turn around.”

But of course I did. And there he was. My lover, my friend, the stranger with whom I’d shared my life. I found myself reaching for him but he backed away. The lines that connected us, that would have drawn us together the day before, were sundered. He was on the water and I was onshore. He had drifted, not far but too far to reach. He was in view but gone for good.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. I glanced down and saw the gun in his hand. There was blood on his hands, on his shirt.

Even these things failed to shock me into fear. I could have-should have-been screaming, begging, weeping. But instead I found myself floating above it all, observing… the body on the floor, my husband’s hands wet with blood. He was so familiar, the surface so well known. But his depths were pure mystery, uncharted, now undiscoverable. All I could think to say was, “Why have you done this?”

When the words were in the air, my middle clenched with nausea. I looked down at Camilla Novak, her stillness, and saw the finality of it all. A door had closed. None of us would ever walk though it again. Our life, my life, was gone. Still, there was no rage rushing to the surface, no tears, no urge to yell. The girl on the floor was dead. But I was undead, moving around stiff and unnatural, my soul sucked from me.

“There’s no answer for that,” he said quietly. “Not one you’ll understand.”

His voice sounded different, gravelly and cold, seemed to echo from those unknowable depths. I didn’t know anything about my husband, if asked, couldn’t extrapolate on one certain detail to understand all the evil he had done.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, two strangers who recognized each other from another life. When he started to move toward the door, I made to follow. But he lifted the gun and I froze. I looked at his face, a cool and distant star. He’d use that gun, without hesitation. He’d kill me where I stood and walk away. The knowledge cut too deep for pain.

“Isabel. Don’t come after me.” I was used to this tone. Paternal. Uncompromising. “Start over. Forget. You’ll be fine.”

I think I smiled at him. Then, beneath the thin mantle of numbness, a rage filled me, replacing any love I’d ever had for him. It was a transformation that took place in minutes-no, seconds.

“If you think you’ll walk away from this, you’re wrong. I’ll find you or die trying.”

I saw something on his face-anger, fear, pity, I couldn’t tell. He opened his mouth to speak but then changed his mind. I didn’t try to stop him as he moved toward the door again. I closed my eyes instead, willing him away. When I opened them, he was gone.