He could follow, as if it were a staircase, each step that had brought him to where he was now. Nancy disappeared. He slipped into despair. He met Sharon in a framing store. She was there to get her cooking school diploma framed while he was selecting a matte for his signed photo from the Governor. They talked. They exchanged numbers. He called. She was attractive, intelligent, stable. She wasn't creative outside the kitchen she loved, and she didn't glow in that same supernatural way that Nancy did. If there were such a thing as past lives, Hood could imagine a dozen or more souls flowing through Nancy's veins. You couldn't see anyone in Sharon but Sharon.

But that was good, he told himself. You want to settle down and raise children with someone who can settle down. And that wasn't Nancy. Life wasn't perfect now, but if he wasn't in heaven with Sharon all the time, he was happy to be in Washington with a wife and family who loved him and respected him and weren't going to run off. Did Nancy ever really respect him? What had she seen in him? During the months following her departure, when he'd done the forensics on their relationship and his love had turned to ash, he'd never really understood what he'd brought to the party.

Hood reached the building lobby. He entered the elevator, and as the speed lift reached Hausen's floor Hood began to feel manipulated. Nancy had left, shown up a score of years later, and presented herself to him. Offered herself to him. Why? Guilt? Not Nancy. She had the conscience of a circus clown. A pie in the face, seltzer down the waistband, oops! A big laugh and all was forgotten, at least by her. And people accepted it because she was selfish but endearing, not malicious. Loneliness? She was never lonely. Eyen when she was alone she was with someone who could keep her amused. A challenge? Maybe. He could picture her asking herself, Have you still got it, Nancy old girl?

Not that it really mattered. He was back in the present, back in the real world where he was in his forties, not twenties, living with his precious little planets instead of a wild, soaring comet. Nancy had come and she had gone, and at least he knew what had happened to her.

And maybe, he thought suddenly and surprisingly, you can stop blaming Sharon because she isn't Nancy. Did some deep, regretful part of him feel that? he wondered. God, it scared him, the cobwebbed corridors to which that staircase of his had taken him.

To complete his emotional buffet, Hood felt guilty for having left poor Hausen standing there, his soul exposed, a black part of his history on his lips. He'd left him without a shoulder or the help of the man to whom he'd just confessed.