THE CONSTRUCTION SITE was walled off from the street by a makeshift bay door that Rich had padlocked from the inside. They were both flush-faced from the thought of him cheating on his fiancée, Gynnie. They stood inside the empty half-built clothing store on a busy downtown street. It was seven o’clock at night.

Their summer of flirting led them here. It felt nice to be standing beside Nora, explaining the benefits of an auxiliary water pump.

No one ever really cared about an auxiliary water pump.

The summer was over. He was about to get married. He felt protected from his life’s unpleasant nauseating impending upheaval the more he joked with her and lied and led her on. It was a relief from the pussified wedding-planning crap that had taken over his brain—from the flowery mailings, the drilling and reenameling of his teeth. Nora was the reward for getting a facial that left him bleeding and humiliated. Why was getting married so humiliating? He didn’t know, but it was.

The only time she tipped her hand even slightly, a week earlier on the phone, it shook him up: “If you’re so into marrying her, then why do you call me every night?”

Rich worked so closely with incoming tenants that when it came time to hand them the keys, he drove away from the site immediately, speechless, and went somewhere alone, exhausted and used up, feeling bleary. No one ever stayed in touch. The magic was in the building. Already Rich and Nora had been through a $29,000 roof-cost overrun, a sinkhole in the street. They’d taken long drives out to the country to look at celery-colored marble.

She was “sweet,” and she “adored” him. She had the demeanor of a cooking-show hostess about to apologize for burning the turkey. She wore a brown cashmere cardigan, a short skirt, white knee-high socks. She sold clothes that looked like that. All over this city, preppy but sexy was in, and now she was renovating the store from scratch.

For all their long talks, he didn’t know much about her. She was violently allergic to nuts, she played soccer in college. He didn’t know, for instance, her age, what decade she played soccer in college. She had thick, creamy makeup, a face that quickly shifted to record any injury. Her walk was jumbled, stilted, uneven but purposeful; it implied a hip injury from childhood that came back and plagued her when it rained. She had a dozen decisions to make tonight about the street-level floor plan so walls could go up next week, questions from the engineers about louvered mezzanine windows, questions about plumbing from the project superintendent.

Nora was his only client. Nora’s happiness was his full-time job.

“You like working with me because I’m lovable—because you love me,” she said once, hoarse from a cold, her voice breaking, hacking in fits.