Our ardor lifted me to a place beyond the stars, and I cannot bear the fall now that you are gone. Could we have gone too high, too fast, too far? Did our hearts burn too brightly for their flame to last? As I must endure the lonely darkness of love’s ashes, I think it would have been better if we had taken flight without them.

Kuhl stared at the newspaper, his eyes locked on a brief possessive phrase in the message’s fourth and last sentence.

Love’s ashes.

Moments passed. Kuhl kept staring at the paper, at that pair of simple words, the sounds of automobiles and pedestrians in the intersection tamped and dulled by the bloodrush in his ears.

Love’s ashes.

Together they formed a second mnemonic. Codewords he had hoped for, but never truly allowed himself to expect.

Kuhl thought of the flame he had lit in the church, that tiny surrendered spark of memory and passion. Then he closed his newspaper and resumed walking quickly toward his apartment hotel as the traffic light across the street changed from red to green.

For the next several hours he would do nothing but wait in his suite to make contact.

“This place is exquisitely nifty,” Megan said. “All we need now is for the Blob to come glooping over us.”

“The what?” Nimec said.

“The Blob,” Megan said. “As in that old fifties make-out movie. Starring Steve McQueen and a thousand tons of gelatin.”

“Oh, right,” Nimec said. He was staring out the windshield of his reconditioned ’57 Corvette roadster at an orange neon sign shimmering the words BIG EDDIE’S SNACK SHACK into the night.

Megan looked at him from the passenger seat.

“The gelatinous lump was known to be gracious and humble in real life, but tended to play very slimy characters. I suppose it was the usual Hollywood typecasting.”

“Hmm.”

“Winning an Oscar for its role must have been some consolation, though,” Megan said. “The story goes that nobody in the Academy knew whether to nominate it for best actor or actress, so they created some kind of special category. Best Performance by an Amorphous Gender-Neutral Green Thing.”

Nimec kept gazing silently at the entrance to the drive-in restaurant as a pretty, ponytailed carhop who seemed about the right age for a college sophomore came roller-skating out to the car.

He pushed in a chrome dashboard knob to douse the lights and glanced over at Megan.

“What are you having to eat?”

“I’m torn between the fried popcorn shrimp and fried clam strip baskets.”

“That time we stopped in Maine a couple years ago, you told me you didn’t like clams.”

“Whole clams,” Megan said. “Much too chewy.”

Nimec looked at her.

“Let’s get one basket of each and split them,” he said.

“Yum, yum,” Megan said. “And don’t forget our side of potato skins. And my Diet Coke. While you’re treating, dear man.”