Maybe best of all was you could have a girl over.

A girl like Jessica Frommer.

Not that she’d ever actually stayed over at his place. But he’d believed that day was imminent. All the more reason to find her now and apologize. He was supposed to have met up with her during the time he was abducted. Since he no longer had a phone, he couldn’t call her, and without his wallet, he couldn’t even pay for a taxi.

So he would walk.

Brian figured Jessica would be surprised to see him. Not just because he hadn’t been in touch for a couple of days, but because she was unaware he knew where she lived.

One night they’d met up at the BestBet Inn, just off Route 98 on the road to Albany. Jessica never wanted to go anywhere with him in Promise Falls, and Brian wondered if that was because she thought maybe he wasn’t good enough for her, that she’d run into her friends when she was with him and be embarrassed. But she’d tell him she just thought Promise Falls was boring and it didn’t have any good restaurants. The BestBet, she said, had a pretty decent buffet. You could pick and choose what you wanted, and there was no limit on how much you could take.

Brian had started getting his hopes up that if Jessica wanted to meet him at a hotel, maybe she had plans that didn’t end with dinner.

He turned out to be right.

So after a meal that included pasta and roast beef and chicken wings and French fries and cherry pie with ice cream and about a dozen other things, Jessica confessed to him that she had booked them a room. At some point, around the time he was loading his plate with mashed potatoes, Brian must have lost hope that it was not going to happen. Now that he knew it was on, he was sorry he’d had quite so much to eat. He felt somewhat bloated.

But whatever.

They went upstairs and their first time was fast and clumsy. But within half an hour Brian was ready to go again, and things got so hot and heavy they didn’t notice that the winds outside were growing increasingly strong. Once Brian had finished, rolled off Jessica and collapsed onto his back on the bed next to her, they could hear the howling gale and the rain hitting the hotel room window. He pulled back the drapes to see a driving rain that was almost going sideways. Visibility was bad, and low spots in the road were flooding over.

Brian said they didn’t have to be in any rush. The room, after all, was booked until the morning. But Jessica said she had to get back home, no matter what the roads were like. Even though they’d brought two cars, Brian offered to give her a lift. He could bring her back the following day to pick up her vehicle. But Jessica said she’d driven through some of the worst snowstorms upstate New York had ever seen, so she wasn’t about to let a few puddles scare her.