“Plays the oboe. He’s wonderful.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “Wonderful across the board? Or wonderful on the oboe?”

Kate slopped more frosting on the cake. “On the oboe. He’s a genius. Of course I’m a genius, too.” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and left a smear of icing traveling down her cheek. “But I’m not as great a genius as Anatole.”

Dave was developing a fast dislike for Anatole. Where’d he get off being a bigger genius than Kate? Dave wanted to make an insulting remark, but he stopped himself. He should think of an intelligent response. Something civilized. “Must have been hard having two geniuses living in the same house.”

“It was bloody awful.” She looked up at Dave with sudden insight. “You know, I didn’t really mind the hysterics and the clashes in personality. I minded the loneliness. We were like ships passing in the night. Separate entities, never really touching, self-absorbed. And it wasn’t any fun.”

Her face lit in a smile that took David Dodd’s breath away.

“Neither of us knew about frosting in a can,” she said.

“Guess there’s all kind of genius,” he said, feeling foolishly happy. His wet shoes squished water onto the kitchen linoleum, and he wondered if anyone else felt the earth shift in its orbit.

Kate opened one eye and directed an oath at the person pounding on her front door. She snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag Dave had loaned her, but the pounding continued. She looked at her watch. Seven-thirty. What idiot was pounding on her door at seven-thirty in the morning? Didn’t they know she was tired? Didn’t they know she’d slept on the living room floor because it had the upgraded rug? The pounding stopped and was replaced by strange scuffling, scratching sounds on her small front porch. Kate sat up in the bag and watched a little old lady inch across the front window. The woman was standing spread-eagle on the wide outdoor window frame, clinging to the raised brickwork, and she was looking in at Kate. She reminded Kate of Piglet when the wind had picked him up and plastered him against Owl’s tree-house window.

“My name’s Elsie Hawkins and I’ve come to see about the room you’ve advertised in the paper,” the women shouted through the glass, “but I’m not going to sleep on no floor. They make everybody sleep on the floor here?”

Kate unzipped the bag and padded barefoot to the foyer. It had stopped raining, and it had turned cold. The wind whipped through her flannel nightgown when she poked her head out the front door. “What are you doing on my window?”

“No one was answering the door, so I thought I’d get up here and take a look at the place.”