“All we have is spaghetti,” she spluttered, finally feeling her tears shrink back.

He laughed a little, but in his laugh she noticed it again—a foreignness, as if it wasn’t really he who was sitting beside her. “I’m sure there’s an all-night grocery store somewhere around here,” he murmured, almost to himself. His fingers, resting on her arm, began moving in little circles, doodling on her skin with invisible ink.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, lowering his eyes to her arm.

“No you’re not.”

His fingers stopped moving. “It’s nothing. It would only upset you more, and anyway it’s not important. I’ll tell you some other time, okay?”

She leaned toward him. “Jake, I’m up. I’m never going to fall asleep tonight.”

He began tracing circles on the bed with his fingers, barely stopping before saying, “On my way over here, I saw someone die.”

Leora felt herself choke. “What are you talking about?”

He completed the circle he was tracing before speaking again, keeping his eyes away from her. “I was walking over here, and about two blocks away from my place, on the corner, there was a fire truck and an ambulance,” he said, finally looking up. “It was one of those crappy old buildings, about five stories tall with a rusty old fire escape. Well, the ladder was up to the top floor of this building. It’s weird—you have this mental picture of a fire from movies, with windows belching flames and everything, but it wasn’t anything like that. To me, it didn’t look like anything. They didn’t even have the sirens on.