“Excuse me!” Pia called out. When there was no response, she called louder, “Hey, you up there!”

Pia’s sharp words caused the man to flinch and hit his head on a pipe up in the ceiling. The man let out an indistinct curse and slowly emerged from the ceiling. After taking one look at Pia, he climbed down from the stepladder. He was about forty-five with grayish stubble and salt-and-pepper hair, wearing dark blue coveralls. His forehead was deeply lined, and he had the sunken cheeks and pale complexion of a lifelong smoker. His body was thin but muscular. His security tag read “Vance Goslin.”

“How long are you going to be?” Pia demanded. She had her arms akimbo.

Goslin was struck immediately by Pia’s remarkable and exotic beauty, her glowing, flawless skin, her full lips, and, perhaps most of all, her huge dark eyes. Adding to her allure was her apparent confidence and forthrightness. In Goslin’s world, girls who looked like Pia acted significantly differently. He was more than casually attracted to her. He was intrigued.

“Depends when I find the problem,” he said. He pointed to two areas on the blueprints lying on the bench. He had a distinct accent that Pia thought she recognized, especially given the name Goslin. “If the problem is here, it’s easy to fix. If the problem is there, it’s harder, but one way or the other we’ll get it done. It might even be done by tonight.”

Goslin nodded as he finished talking, eagerly continuing to scan Pia’s shapely body as he’d done while he’d been talking. He did it overtly, as if it were a matter of right. Eventually his gaze alighted on Pia’s hospital ID. “Grazdani,” he voiced, raising his eyebrows questioningly. “Now, that’s an unusual name.”

Pia didn’t respond, making him think she might be hard of hearing.

“Your name is unusual. Is it Italian?” he said, raising his voice. He had assumed a wry smile as if he knew Grazdani was not Italian. It was his way of flirting.

“No, it isn’t Italian. And why are you shouting?”

Pia had talked about her Albanian heritage maybe twice in her life and she wasn’t about to do it now with this person. There were thousands of Albanians in New York City, and Pia remembered enough of the language to recognize an Albanian accent when she heard it. Once when she was ordering a slice of pizza, two young men behind the counter started a frank appraisal of her physical attributes in their language before Pia asked them in English if they wanted her to talk to the manager about their rudeness.

“Actually I’d guess Albanian,” Goslin said, the smile continuing. “I’m of Albanian descent, and I have a lot of Albanian friends here in New York. They work in maintenance like me. We’ve kinda taken over the business. . . .”

Pia wasn’t listening. It was barely an hour since she’d been dreaming about one childhood nightmare and now this man was reminding her of another—her father—which added to her growing irritation. Even though she was offering nothing to this maintenance worker that he could take as encouragement, he was still talking, trying to engage her in conversation.