“Very well,” Rowland said. “I shall repeat the suggestion a year from now. In the meantime, I’ll just make myself indispensable.”

“You’re indispensable now,” she replied dryly. “As I suspect you know.”

A year passed; during that year Rowland’s newspaper decided to send him to France. Rowland rejected this assignment, and subsequently resigned. To his surprise, he found it was an easy decision: Esther’s work tied her to Washington; his did not, but he found that he had plenty of freelance work there from both British and American papers. His English friends doubted the wisdom of this move, and Max—visiting from London—castigated him for it. Their demurrals made Rowland impatient; he did not doubt his own abilities; he knew he could alter the course of his career; he intended, and needed, to be with Esther: the choice was effortless, and no sacrifice was involved.

“Marry me,” Rowland said to her—and being meticulous about such things, he reiterated his proposal exactly one year later, to the hour.

“I just might do that,” Esther replied.

A date was arranged; the week before, they were due to visit her brother again, in New Orleans. Her brother, host to them on several previous occasions, had promised to be Rowland’s best man. At the last minute Rowland was forced to cancel that visit to cover an urgent story. He was writing up his copy, was near to completing it, when Esther announced she was just going out to the grocery store.

He had glanced around quickly from his desk; Esther had smiled, waved a hand at him, and told him to hurry up and finish writing. Now, sitting in his kitchen, his coffee cold and undrunk, Rowland looked at that tiny, frozen frame: the last time he had seen her alive. Had he not changed the date of their visit, she would still have been alive; they would have been married, might have had—would surely have had—children. My fault, he thought as he always thought at this point. My fault, and I didn’t even say good-bye.

The boy who killed her, a crack addict just sixteen years old, stopped her on the way back from the store. Two blocks from their house. He demanded her purse—and, according to the witnesses, Esther at once gave it to him. For no known or comprehensible reason, the boy shot her anyway. He raised his gun and fired into her neck at point-blank range. Esther fell; she bled to death on the sidewalk. Mindful perhaps of AIDS statistics, the little clutch of bystanders who gathered around her did nothing; no one administered first aid.

That fact, which had made him so bitterly angry at the time, still made him so now, six years later. It would, almost certainly, have made little difference—or so Rowland was subsequently informed. Still, it remained for him an act of iniquity: even if those witnesses could not have saved her, surely one of them at least could have held her, cradled her, talked to her as she died?