Hold still, she told herself. She stood her ground. “They still haven’t found her, you know. That girl.”

“Who, Brittany?” He let his hand dance in the air like a shadow puppet before his fingers made a gentle landing on her belly, and she held her breath. “I’m long over her.”

His touch gave her goosebumps. She backed away. “What did you do to her?”

“She ran out on me. I misjudged her. She was bad news. I made a mistake, okay? People make mistakes.”

“How can she be ‘bad news’? She’s fifteen years old.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that. Do you want to go on punishing me or do you want to hear what I’ve come to say?”

“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear, Paul.”

“Paul? So now I’m just Paul again.” He took a step back. “Look, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to her.”

She opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of milk. She had to keep moving.

“I don’t want to debate this,” he said. “You’ve got no one and I’ve got no one. You know me like no other and I know you like no other. Don’t you see the grand sweep of our narrative? Clean slate. Square one. Baby steps.” He reached out again for her belly.

“We’re not sixteen years old anymore. I’ve moved on. I really have.” She brought out a bag of lollipops from the larder and emptied it into a ceramic dog bowl. “Trick-or-treaters will be here any second now.”

He unwrapped one of the candies.

“Think about it, Kate. Clean slate. You and me.” The doorbell rang: trick-or-treaters. He stuck the red lollipop into his mouth and gave her one last look. “The knives are under the sink.”

Their window on the third floor had a view of the parking lot with its charming pair of matching potholes. On the ground floor was an alarmed exit by a dumpster where they’d watched the chambermaids eat burritos and bum cigarettes off two separate delivery boys. Other than that, more rooms, and more rooms.

“Couldn’t you at least have picked a place with a pool?” Mira said.

“You don’t even swim,” said Rosemary.

“I was welcoming the prospect of a glamorous drowning death.” Mira exhaled onto the windowpane and scrawled a skull on the condensation before it vanished.

In the facing wing, a geezer with a sunken chest watched TV in his underwear. Above him, an enormous woman holding a bag of chips in one hand closed the drapes with the other. Three windows from her, a good-looking man in a business suit sat on the bedcovers, clutching his head. Each window was a vignette, limited in narrative scope and yet compelling in its immediacy. They never saw any children.

“Hey,” Mira said, “do you think people are staying here tonight to avoid trick-or-treaters?”