Darren shook his head and apologized. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “It must be painful to talk about, all of it.” It had been only a couple of months since the investigation in Lark, when she’d had to reveal that Michael had been unfaithful while also trying to deal with the gut-punch reality of his sudden death.

“No, I mean I don’t think I can talk about your wife,” she said.

She was quiet on the line for a while. Darren saw flickers of candlelight between the velvet curtains, heard a few giggles through the glass. The ghost tours were starting up again. So…he told her about them instead, about the whole business of selling the past that made up a good portion of the economy of Jefferson, Texas. He even flicked back a corner of the curtain to describe the current tour group, which included one woman who was dressed in full antebellum regalia, a butter-yellow cinched-waist confection that on second glance might actually have been a Halloween costume for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This made Randie laugh. And so he kept talking. He told her about the ghost that supposedly haunted his room, told her about waking up from the dream and thinking he saw Penelope Deschamps standing with a gun at the foot of his bed—anything to break the tension that had sprung up between them, which he found he could bear no better than she could. She talked about where she was staying, a boutique hotel near the Ponte Vecchio, talked about the leather goods she was shooting for a spread in French Vogue and the fact that she’d eaten her weight in gelato the first few days she was in town, lonely and trying not to pick up her old habit of smoking, difficult when there were so many people around her looking impossibly beautiful and glamorous while smoking in every piazza, in every street. She remembered how he used cigarettes in Lark to play a part, to look harmless and insignificant, to gain entry into places like the parking lot of the icehouse in town, where they’d been shot at, “for fuck’s sake.” Darren groaned, but there was something playful in it, the pleasure of recalling an improbable survival. He reminded Randie of how ridiculous she’d looked driving his truck, and they both laughed until the silence crept up between them again, the air charged with things that weren’t being said.

“But you never smoked for real?” she asked. “Not even in college?”

“No. My mother smokes. That killed the idea of glamour right there.”