Mountain bikes have been lost in Angie’s bedroom, and now she was looking for a pen.

After several drawers were banged open and change and lighters and earrings were moved around on the tops of nightstands, someone said, “What’re you looking for?”

“A pen.”

“Here.”

She came back on the line. “Got a pen.”

“Paper?” I said.

“Oh, shit.”

That took another minute.

“Go ahead,” she said.

I gave her Jason Warren’s class schedule and dorm room number. She’d tail him while I waited for Stan Timpson’s call.

“Got it,” she said. “Damn, I got to get moving.”

I looked at my watch. “His first class isn’t till ten-thirty. You got time.”

“Nope. Got an appointment at nine-thirty.”

“With who?”

Her breathing was slightly labored, and I assumed she was tugging on jeans. “My attorney. See you at Bryce whenever you get there.”

She hung up and I stared out at the avenue below. It seemed cut from a canyon, the day was so clear, striped hard as a frozen river between rows of three-deckers and brick. Windshields were seared white and opaque by the sun.

An attorney? Sometimes in the heady flush of my past three months with Grace, I’d remember with something like surprise that my partner was also out there living a life. Separate from my own. Her life with its attorneys and entanglements and minidramas and men who handed her pens in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning.

So, who was this attorney? And who was the guy who handed her the pen? And why should I care?

And what the hell did “soon” mean?

I had ninety minutes or so to kill before Timpson called, and after I exercised, I still had over an hour. I went looking for something in my fridge that wasn’t beer or soda, and came up empty, so I walked up the avenue to the corner store for my coffee.

I took it back out onto the avenue and leaned against a light pole for a few minutes, enjoyed the day, and sipped my coffee as traffic rolled by and pedestrians rushed past on their way to the subway stop at the end of Crescent.

Behind me I could smell the stench of stale beer and soaked-in-wood whiskey wafting from The Black Emerald Tavern. The Emerald opened at eight for those getting off the graveyard shift, and now, close to ten, it sounded no different than it did on a Friday night, a gaggle of slurred, lazy voices punctuated by the occasional bellow or the sharp crack of a pool cue making impact with a rack of balls.

“Hey, stranger.”

I turned and looked down into the face of a petite woman with a hazy, liquid grin. She had her hand over her eyes to block the sun and it took me a minute to place her because the hair and clothes were different and even her voice had deepened since the last time I’d heard it, though it was still light and ephemeral, as if it might lift off into the breeze before the words had time to dig in.