A good son, Tom had offered to travel out from Tenafly to help. And he had almost accepted his son’s offer. That’s how daunting it all seemed. But this was something he had to see to himself. Retired, widowed, moving back east to live with his boy, it was probably one of the last things he would see to himself.

•

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the window, the wide, cracked terrain of the Navajo reached to the horizon, ruthless and red. On his way east, he had been impressed by the buttes. Fixed against the sky, they seemed the ultimate survivors—outlasters of time and intent—as solitary and majestic as anything known to man. He had looked forward to passing back through this country, so that he could study them again. But as the train rushed on, he realized that they had become a blur. Without being conscious of it, he had let them recede from his field of vision so that he could consider the young lady’s reflection in the window instead.

He first had seen her on the platform in New York—smoking a cigarette, with a small red valise at her feet. Fine-figured with sandy hair, elegant and self-possessed, she was hard to miss even in a crowd. Perhaps, especially in a crowd. He had taken a step to his right to get a better look, but the doors to the train had opened and she had disappeared among the getting off and the getting on.

What with finding his own compartment and securing his bag and making polite conversation with the shoe-leather salesman from Des Moines, he forgot altogether about the young lady with the red valise. Until the following morning when, as the train was nearing Chicago, he was seated at her table for breakfast.

She was gazing out the window and tapping the table with a brand-new pack of cigarettes. She didn’t even look back to see who was joining her. But when the waiter offered to refill her cup, she turned just long enough to politely decline. And that’s when he saw how her beauty had been marred.

He was surprised that he had missed it before. Because it had to be more than two inches long—running from the top of her cheekbone to the top of her chin. He had seen hundreds of them, of course. Star-shaped scars from a bludgeon to the brow; crescent-shaped scars from a knife on Encino; wide, white scars from fat-fingered stitch-ups in makeshift surgeries in the backs of garages. But those scars had all been on men, and they had been earned. Hunted. Almost longed for. With an inward shake of the head he turned to the menu and tried not to study the girl too closely, knowing that he would get a good look at her once she got up from the table.