He was not sure he had heard her. “Sure?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

He smiled. “Okay, Amy. I look forward to it.”

He was lousy at asking women out. He did not know what had come over him to press himself on her. He expected her to be long gone when he returned.

Surprise, surprise, she was still there. Her house was not far, she said. They walked her niece home before going to the Starbucks. Along the way the conversation stalled. He did discover, however, that she worked part-time in a lawyer’s office and that she lived with her father and sister—Debra’s mother. He assumed the kid’s father was long gone.

They ordered coffee and pastries and sat in a quiet corner. She continued to have trouble looking at him. He had the opposite problem. Her skin was like the coffee and cream he was drinking. Somewhere along the line he asked if she had a boyfriend and she shook her head. He did not think for a second she was lying. But later he was to come to understand that she still had some contact with a guy named David, who lived on the East Coast. However, the guy was not a part of her life, she made clear. He worked on Wall Street, brokering commodities for his rich father.

By chance Matt mentioned an Alfred Hitchcock film he had seen the night before and her eyes lit up. Sweet, innocent Amy was a hard-core mystery buff, of both books and films. Her tastes belonged to an earlier generation. Besides Hitchcock, she loved Sherlock Holmes, and everything Agatha Christie had written. Suddenly their talk took off, and he had to struggle to keep up. He wished right then that he was a writer. He would have done anything to impress her.

They went on a real date, dinner and a movie. She was a vegetarian. She liked Indian food, so he learned to like it. She did not kiss him on their first date. She did not kiss him on the second either. In fact, he was to date her three months before he was allowed to kiss her good night. The experience was frustrating—very weird, actually—but he felt she was worth the wait. He was not totally naive. He saw an element of manipulation in the way she kept her distance. But he attributed it to her Latin blood. Make the guy beg.

When they finally did make out, the first time, after her family had gone to bed, she burst out crying. Concerned, he begged her to tell him what was wrong. She shook like a wounded child. An old pain had come up, she said. She refused to elaborate. He did not even think of David; she had assured him that was over. But from that night on he got a sick feeling in his gut, a feeling that was never to leave him over the next eighteen months.