“Give me your address again,” he said, breaking the silence between us. “So I can order you a car.”

At the front door he pulled out his wallet. “I almost forgot to pay you,” he said. “You have to remind me. Don’t let me get away with that.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it,” I said, though it wasn’t true.

He counted out a stack of fifty-dollar bills. “I’m giving you extra,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m just giving you extra,” he said, shoving the money at me.

LONNIE WAS SICK THE WHOLE NEXT DAY. I CAME TO WATCH William even though it was a Saturday. I wondered if James would try anything else while Lonnie was incapacitated, but he was distant and locked himself up in the office when he wasn’t bringing the garbage pail of Lonnie’s vomit and back and forth from the bed to the toilet. Lonnie couldn’t get out of bed to make it to the bathroom. Maybe he felt guilty. He probably should’ve.

“My legs don’t work,” Lonnie said when I peeked in to check on her while William napped. “I can move them now, but they won’t hold me up.”

“You really scared me,” I said. It was the same garbage pail I’d taken her gum out of and put into my mouth, I realized.

“I feel like such an idiot,” she said. “I don’t remember anything. It’s all a blank.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was just having one drink before I came home. I never drink alone, but I needed it. No one talked to me. Nothing strange happened. I remember leaving but then that’s it.”

“It was only one drink?”

“I have this pain in my hand,” she said. “Right down the middle. It won’t go away.”

“You were poisoned.”

“No,” she said. “It’s in my hand but it’s in my mind.”

I sat down on the bed next to her, and she grabbed my arm. “Elle,” she said. “Thank God you were there. I just kept thinking about when I had William. There was a time when they left me all alone in the room and I tried to get up but passed out on the floor from the pain. It’s so scary to be alone.”

Her skin was still as ashen as the night before, her face totally devoid of its usual blush. Her eyebrows furrowed, as with pain. I leaned down, and without letting myself stop to think, kissed her once, full on her sour mouth, then got up and left. We never discussed the gesture, but I felt better about James after that.