Constantine held out her chair. His hand brushed hers as she sat down, and she had to fight the urge to take it and examine it closely for signs of kindness or hatred. It was a good hand, the fingers long and elegant, like those of a pianist. She tried not to think about the length of them, the feeling they’d create inside her, how deep he could go.

She ordered a fresh espresso. He ordered a Scotch and smiled at her quite charmingly.

“It’s the middle of the day,” he said. “We’re on vacation, you and I. Have a real drink with me. Just one.”

“Champagne,” she amended to the waiter, who turned away with a brusque nod. “I am not on vacation, though.”

Drinking champagne with a stranger on the sidewalk of a Parisian café in broad daylight. This couldn’t lead anywhere good.

Oh, but it might, Sutton. Two drinks and you might be on your back with your legs in the air, Constantine Raffalo straining above you with a look of adoration in his eyes.

The doctors had told her the preoccupation with fantasy, with imagination, with sex, was a symptom of her disease. It helped with the writing, certainly, but sometimes, she wondered if that was all she was. A disease. Her ability to create, to evoke a scene, a scent, a feeling, was all part of the disordered chaos in her brain. They’d claimed it was something to do with serotonin reuptake, and the way it didn’t allow the neural pathways to connect properly, leaving her out in the cold with an overactive, obsessive imagination and a frightening sense of exhilaration, an inability to stop her mind and her thoughts from racing, to the point that she often felt the world was rushing headlong forward, the pedal all the way to the floor. Sometimes, when things were just about to turn very, very bad, she could actually feel the earth rotating on its axis beneath her feet.

Sutton knew she was only partially of this world; the day-to-day life of mankind, the commutes and the news and the seasons, time passing gently to mere mortals. When she was on the verge, she could tap into some sort of collective unconscious and see the truths of the universe.

Which, of course, to some—including her bitch of a doctor—made her textbook, bona fide, certifiably crazy.

So Sutton wrote. She felt better when she wrote. The doctor had once told her it was simply a method of controlling her psychosis, how she was able to corral the multitude of voices in her head by putting words on the page.