Romeo is polite but avoids their eyes and, like a mime, is completely silent.

“I want what’s best for you,” Benton says. “Which is why, obviously, I didn’t get in your way when you decided to start your own practice in Charleston, but I was upset about it.”

“You never told me.”

“I shouldn’t tell you now. What you’ve done is right and I know it. For years you’ve felt you really don’t belong anywhere. In a sense, homeless, and in some ways unhappy ever since you left Richmond—worse, sorry to remind you, were fired. That goddamn piss-ant governor. At this stage in your life, you’re doing exactly what you should.” As they board the elevator. “But I’m not sure I can stand it anymore.”

She tries not to feel a fear that is indescribably awful. “What do I hear you saying, Benton? That we should give up? Is that what you’re really saying?”

“Maybe I’m saying the opposite.”

“Maybe I don’t know what that means, and I wasn’t flirting.” As they get out on their floor. “I never flirt. Except with you.”

“I don’t know what you do when I’m not around.”

“You know what I don’t do.”

He unlocks the door to their penthouse suite. It is splendid with antiques and white marble and a stone patio big enough to entertain a small village. Beyond, the ancient city is silhouetted against the night.

“Benton,” she says. “Please, let’s don’t fight. You’re flying back to Boston in the morning. I’m flying back to Charleston. Let’s don’t push each other away so it somehow makes it easier to be away from each other.”

He takes off his coat.

“What? You’re angry that I’ve finally found a place to settle down, started again in a place that works for me?” she says.

He tosses his coat over a chair.

“In all fairness,” she says, “I’m the one who has to start all over again, create something out of nothing, answer my own phone, and clean up the damn morgue myself. I don’t have Harvard. I don’t have a multimillion-dollar apartment in Beacon Hill. I have Rose, Marino, and sometimes Lucy. That’s it, so I end up answering the phone myself half the time. The local media. Solicitors. Some group that wants me as a luncheon speaker. The exterminator. The other day, it was the damn Chamber of Commerce—how many of their damn phone directories do I want to order. As if I want to be listed in the Chamber of Commerce directory as if I’m a dry cleaner or something.”

“Why?” Benton says. “Rose has always screened your calls.”

“She’s getting old. She can do but so much.”

“Why can’t Marino answer the phone?”

“Why anything? Nothing’s the same. Your making everyone think you were dead fractured and scattered everyone. There, I’ll say it. Everybody’s changed because of it, including you.”

“I had no choice.”

“That’s the funny thing about choices. When you don’t have one, nobody else does, either.”

“That’s why you’ve put down roots in Charleston. You don’t want to choose me. I might die again.”