He pushed down and the picture came forward, summoned out of the glass screen, blooming into a clear image. A woman in a long red gown was being led by a guy in a tuxedo from a limousine to a jet airplane. He didn’t recognize the movie, but considering he’d spent the last twenty years of his life in the hard-core military, there hadn’t been a lot of time for going to the damn pictures.

When he hit info, Jim had to laugh. Pretty Woman was evidently about a prostitute and a businessman falling in love. He glanced up at the ceiling. “Guess I got it wrong the first time, huh, boys.”

That evening, when Marie-Terese walked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, her feet were slow and the aisle down to the altar seemed a mile long. As she passed by the chapels of the saints, heading for the confessionals, she paused at the fourth bay in. The life-sized figure of a pious Mary Magdalene had been removed from its pedestal, the white marble statue no doubt having been taken to be cleaned of dust and incense residue.

The empty space made her realize that she’d decided to leave Caldwell.

It was all getting to be too much. She just was not in a place in her life where she could afford to get emotionally attached to a man, and that was happening with Vin already. Those dead college boys aside, more time around him was not going to help her, and she was a free agent, able to hit the road at any moment—

The creaking of a door behind her pricked her nerves, but when she looked over her shoulder, no one was close by. As usual, the church and all of its pews were essentially empty, with just two women in black veils praying up front and a man wearing a Red Sox baseball cap settling on his knees in the far back.

As she continued down the aisle, the weight of her decision to pull out of town exhausted her. Where would she go? And how much would it cost to think up another identity? And work. What would she do about that? Trez was unique in the business, and the Iron Mask was the only place she could imagine doing what she did.

Except how would she cover the bills?

At the pair of confessionals, there were a couple of people before her, so she waited with them, smiling once in greeting and then keeping her eyes elsewhere, as they did. Which was always the way it went. The guilty tended not to want to make conversation when they were about to unload, and she wondered if the others were practicing what they would say, just as she was.

No matter what their issues were, she figured she could lap them in the sin contest. Easy.

“Hello.”