"I didn't reject you," she said quietly. "Not a day has crept by that I didn't wish I'd grabbed you and taken you with me. Because I saw this in you as well, the conviction of a goddamn knight. You were the only person I ever knew who didn't need New Year's Eve to make resolutions. You always did what you thought was right and then stuck to your decisions."

Hood put the stubs in his wallet. "If it's any consolation, I wish to hell you had grabbed me and taken me with you." He grinned. "Though I'm not sure how I would've taken to being Paul and Nancy, the jet-setting Bonnie and Clyde."

"Shittily," she said. "You'd probably have made me turn myself in."

Hood embraced her, pulled her head to his chest. She held onto him tightly, then tighter still. But it was innocent this time. And a part of him was very, very sad.

"Nance?" he said.

"I know," she replied, still snuggled in his arms. "You want to know about my work."

"Something rotten's happening on-line," he said.

"But something nice is happening here," she said. "I feel safe. Can't I enjoy it a little bit longer?"

Hood stood there listening to his watch tick, looking at the sky darkening outside the window, concentrating on anything but the dream that was in his arms and in his memory. He stood there thinking, checkout is in the early afternoon. She stayed to see me, hasn't checked out because she's anticipating more.

But that wasn't why he was here. An end had to be made.

"Nancy," he said into her ear, "I have to ask you a question."

"Yes?" she said expectantly.

"Have you ever heard of a man named Gerard Dominique?"

Nancy stiffened in his arms, then pushed off against his chest. "Could you possibly be more romantic?"

His face turned as if he'd been slapped by the rebuke. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "You know--" he started, stopped, looked into her eyes. "You know I can be. You should know that I want to be. But I didn't come here for romance, Nancy."

Her own eyes pained, she looked at her watch. "There's a plane I can still catch and I think I'll go catch it." She looked from her watch to the bed to her suitcase. "I don't need a ride, thanks. You can go."

Hood didn't move. It was as if two decades had evaporated and he was standing in her apartment, caught in one of those arguments that had started as a flake and had suddenly become a blizzard. It was funny how memory diminished those, but there had been a lot of them.

"Nancy," Hood said, "we think that Gerard Dominique may be behind the hate video games which have begun showing up in America. A game like that just showed up on Hausen's computer, with Hausen in it."