“Someplace nice,” she said confidently. She perched on the couch beside me, one long leg folded up beneath her, her coffee cup balanced on the other knee. She was wearing the same wine-colored jeans she’d worn at Armstrong’s, along with a lemon yellow sweater. She didn’t seem to be wearing anything under the sweater. Her feet were bare, the toenails the same tawny port as her fingernails. She’d been wearing bedroom slippers but kicked them off before sitting down.

I took in the blue of her eyes, the green of her square-cut ring, then found my eyes drawn to the rug. It looked as though someone had taken each of those colors and beaten them with a wire whisk.

She blew on her coffee, sipped it, leaned far forward and set the cup on the coffee table. Her cigarettes were on the table and she lit one. She said, “I don’t know what you said to Chance but you really made an impression on him.”

“I don’t see how.”

“He called this morning and said he would be coming over, and when he got here I had the door on the chain lock, and somehow I just knew I didn’t have anything to fear from him. You know how sometimes you just know something?”

I knew, all right. The Boston Strangler never had to break a door down. All his victims opened the door and let him in.

She pursed her lips, blew out a column of smoke. “He was very nice. He said he hadn’t realized I was unhappy and that he had no intention of trying to hold me against my will. He seemed hurt that I could have thought that of him. You know something? He had me just about feeling guilty. And he had me feeling I was making a big mistake, that I was throwing something away and I’d be sorry I couldn’t ever get it back. He said, ‘You know, I never take a girl back,’ and I thought, God, I’m burning my bridges. Can you imagine?”

“I think so.”

“Because he’s such a con artist. Like I’m walking away from a great job and forfeiting my stake in the corporate pension plan. I mean, come on!”

“When do you have to be out of the apartment?”

“He said by the end of the month. I’ll probably be gone before then. Packing’s no big deal. None of the furniture’s mine. Just clothes and records, and the Hopper poster, but do you want to know something? I think that can stay right here. I don’t think I need the memories.”