I walked right up to Mary. Red hair she still had in abundance, although I would not like to conjecture how she kept out the gray. She wore a dark green evening dress with brocade straps. Her gaze was contemptuous, perhaps, or merely guarded.

Ignoring my presence—something she would have done at her peril in the old days—she repeated, “Duncan is composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he’s still alive.”

As she said this, she took a step forward and turned and looked right at me. We stood only a foot or two apart.

I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the full venom of my stare. Then I hobbled forward and I slapped her hard across the face. She grunted in surprise, seemed stunned more than hurt.

She wasn’t that much taller than me, really. Not as tall as she’d seemed while I was coming down the stairs. And not as young as she had seemed, either. My hand came away covered in makeup.

The imprint shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown. If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she wound up hurting herself as well.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “no one knew your name. Someday no one will again.”

The wide “O” of the mouth, the speechless surprise, the backward step, the hand raised toward her cheek, the fear in her eyes as if she saw herself already as dust. That slap would tease a thousand tongues in a dozen cafés that week, until even the swift-darting swallows that so love our city repeated it in their incessant, insect-seducing song.

To her credit, she waved back the guards. She waved back the onrush of beads from her flesh necklace. They retreated, gleaming and muttering.

“What is it you really want, Janice?” she said, smiling through her pain. “Would you like the past back? Would you like to be successful again? Would you prefer you weren’t a washed-up has-been with so few prospects you had to agree to assist to help out with a party for an artist you used to agent?”

But I had nothing to say to her.

Instead, I turned to look at the assembled fawners and sycophants, the neophytes and the desperate, to make sure they were watching. Then I took the glasses from my pocket—and flung them at Mary’s face. I didn’t know I was going to do it until the instant it happened, and then it was too late to un-wish it.