The next morning, when she made her way down to breakfast, Brenda was gone. Fitz was already sitting at a table in the back corner of the patio, dressed in the shorts and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt he’d taken to wearing day in and day out, Corey slouched beside him in his even more minimal outfit—shorts, period. They’d finished the huevos rancheros Carlos’s wife, Reina, had served them and pushed away their plates, Fitz bent now over a dog-eared text called Personality Psychology and Corey absorbed in one of the Mexican comics Carlos had given him from his own personal supply stacked up on the shelves just inside the door to the pantry. “Good morning,” she said, easing down across from them while gesturing to Reina to bring her coffee and a plate of the eggs. “Or should I say, ‘Buenos días’?”

“Buenos días,” Fitz said, without glancing up. Corey said nothing. His eyes never left the page.

“Well, okay,” she said, “thanks for that enthusiastic greeting, you two. By the way, anybody hear what happened with Peggy? Or Brenda?”

Fitz glanced up. “Carlos drove her to the airport first thing.”

“Who, Brenda?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s gone?”

“Apparently.”

She paused to light a cigarette and watch a lizard no longer than her teaspoon appear over the rim of the table, then shoot across the surface and down the far side before Corey, his senses alerted now, could snatch it up and add it to the terrarium he’d already begun to assemble in the wake of last night’s disaster. “That was sudden,” she said.

“You can only have one girlfriend at a time,” Corey piped up, looking from her to Fitz and back again. “Tommy Eggers told me.”

“Really?” she said. “And why’s that?”

He dropped his eyes to the comic. “Because you only have one dick.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said.

“I’m not. It’s what Tommy said.”

Fitz, far from supporting her, just laughed. “Maybe we should ask Tim.”