By midnight he could not endure it. He walked down and in the quiet weeknight cranked the Ford and drove with enough moon to not need the headlamps along the spread valley between the mountains to the Profile House in Franconia where the waitress Alice refused to speak with him, where the bartender served him a single watered drink before the bar closed and occupied himself counting the till and had no inclination for conversation. And Jamie then went back to the Thayer where the night clerk was sleeping sprawled forward in his chair so Jamie slipped his knifeblade into the kitchen door and worked the lock and had cut slabs of ham and was frying them up with eggs when the clerk stepped into the kitchen and Jamie turned and waved a free hand indicating what was cooking and told the clerk to put it on his bill. The clerk backed out of the kitchen nodding his head and reaching behind him for the door and was gone before Jamie realized the hand he waved still held the knife he’d sliced through the ham. He held on to the knife and used it to slide the ham—and then the eggs on top—onto a plate before setting the knife on the counter. Wiped it first with a rag. Tore a large heel from a loaf and sat at the butcher table and ate the food. Three-thirty in the morning. Wherever she was she was twelve hours gone. He wondered if the rest of his life would be like this.

It was ten days before he went back to the house. He mostly stayed in the room at the Thayer, taking his breakfast in the hotel dining room. Before that he would go out and get shaved. Then long hours alone in the armchair next to the window of his room gazing down onto the street without making note of any passing thing. Each night he would drive out to Bethlehem and spend a couple of hours at the Sinclair locked in his office going over the books and writing out orders or amending those already made and reviewing time sheets and suchlike. He would send out an order for a dinner to be brought to him and he would eat it there alone with the office door locked after the girl had brought the plate of food. Whosoever knocked upon his door otherwise would only be one of the nightshift bartenders or the hotel general manager and these times few and the problems brief and minor but someway needing his approval or words of confirmation. And any of these men would meet his eye while speaking and then look away from him and he did not want to know what the talk was, what was being said, what people believed of him or did not believe. Finished with that he would drive back to Littleton and the third-floor room where he would wash his face in the basin and turn off the hanging single electric light bulb, watching the filament burn a slow orange disappearance in the dark and would lie in the bed, sleeping or not, dreaming or not, all through the night. He rose each day not rested but further abraded as if the sheets and the hours in the armchair worked at the thin layer of skin over him that was daily nothing more than a sack to hold his stranded heart.