She hung up on my incoherent protest. I smiled a little—gruff to the end. I hoped I was that tough forty years ahead.

The only thing that really troubled me was Caroline Djiak; I couldn’t get her to talk to me. She’d resurfaced after a day’s absence, but she wouldn’t come to the phone, and when I drove down to Houston Street she shut the door on me, not even letting me in to see Louisa. I kept thinking I’d made a terrible mistake—not just in telling her about Jurshak, but in keeping up my dogged search when she’d been trying to call me off.

Lotty shook her head sternly when I fretted about it. “You’re not God, Victoria. You can’t pick and choose what’s best for people’s lives. And if you’re going to spend hours in lachrymose self-pity, please do it someplace else—it’s not an appetizing spectacle. Or find another line of work. Your dogged searches, as you call them, spring from a fundamental clarity of vision. If you no longer have that sight, you no longer are suited to your job.”

Her bracing words didn’t kill my self-doubts, but in time even my worries over Caroline receded. When she called in early June to tell me Louisa had died, I could accept her abrupt conversation with relative equanimity.

I went to the funeral at St. Wenceslaus, but not to the house on Houston for food afterward. Louisa’s parents were running the event, and whether they aped pious grief or murmured sly animadversions on divine providence I would be hard put to control my desire to decimate them.

Caroline made no effort to speak to me at the service; by the time I got home my lachrymose self-pity over her had been replaced by an older, more familiar feeling—irritation at her brattiness. So when I found her waiting on my doorstep a month or so later, I didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms.

“I’ve been here since three,” she said without introduction. “I was afraid you’d gone out of town.”

“Sorry I didn’t leave my schedule with your secretary,” I replied sardonically. “But then, of course, I wasn’t anticipating the pleasure.”

“Don’t be mean, Vic,” she begged. “I know I deserve it—I’ve been a horse’s rear end the last four months. But I need to apologize or explain or—well, anyway, I don’t want you only to be mad when you think about me.”

I unlocked the lobby door. “You know, Caroline, I’m reminded irresistibly of Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. You know how she always promises this time she won’t pull it away just as he’s kicking—and she always does, and he always lands smack on his butt? I have a feeling I’m about to end on my ass one last time, but come on up.”

Her ready color came. “Vic, please—I know I deserve anything you want to say to me, but I’ve come here to apologize. Don’t make it harder on me than it already is.”