I drank some of my coffee. It was weaker than I preferred it. The record ended and was followed by a piano trio. She told me again how I had impressed Chance. “He wanted to know how I happened to call you,” she said. “I was vague, I said you were a friend of a friend. He said I didn’t need to hire you, that all I’d had to do was talk to him.”

“That’s probably true.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think I would have started talking to him, assuming I could work up the nerve, and we’d get into this conversation and gradually I would turn around and the whole subject would be shunted off to the side. And I’d leave it shunted off to the side, you know, because without ever coming out and saying it he’d manage to give me the impression that leaving him wasn’t something I was going to be allowed to do. He might not say, ‘Look, bitch, you stay where you’re at or I’ll ruin your face.’ He might not say it, but that’s what I’d hear.”

“Did you hear it today?”

“No. That’s the point. I didn’t.” Her hand fastened on my arm just above the wrist. “Oh, before I forget,” she said, and my arm took some of her weight as she got up from the couch. Then she was across the room rummaging in her purse, and then she was back on the couch handing me five hundred-dollar bills, presumably the ones I’d returned to her three days earlier.

She said, “It seems like there ought to be a bonus.”

“You paid me well enough.”

“But you did such a good job.”

She had one arm draped over the back of the sofa and she was leaning toward me. I looked at her blonde braids coiled around her head and thought of a woman I know, a sculptor with a loft in Tribeca. She did a head of Medusa with snakes for hair and Kim had the same broad brow and high cheekbones as Jan Keane’s piece of sculpture.

The expression was different, though. Jan’s Medusa had looked profoundly disappointed. Kim’s face was harder to read.

I said, “Are those contacts?”

“What? Oh, my eyes? That’s their natural color. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“It’s unusual.”

Now I could read her face. It was anticipation that I saw there.

“Beautiful eyes,” I said.

The wide mouth softened into the beginning of a smile. I moved a little toward her and she came at once into my arms, fresh and warm and eager. I kissed her mouth, her throat, her lidded eyes.