“I need to get out of here,” he said, bouncing up and breaking the tension. “It’s too hot to even breathe. I need to burn off some energy. Do you think I would definitely kill myself if I tried to do a fall down the Central Park steps, or just probably kill myself?”

“I’d go with the first one,” Lola said, picking up the nail polish brush again.

“That’s what I thought, too,” Spencer said, disappointedly. “Think I’ll just go curl into a ball.”

“What’s the problem with you two?” Scarlett said, when he was gone.

“There’s no problem,” Lola said. “We have different ways of looking at things. We always have.”

“It’s more than that,” Scarlett said.

Lola replaced the nail polish brush and looked up at Scarlett.

“I’m afraid for him sometimes,” she said.

Lola’s plainspoken sincerity struck a chord. If she was being very truthful with herself, Scarlett was a little afraid, too. She never questioned Spencer’s ability…just their general luck. She worried for them all. Every day something else seemed to chip off this quivering pile that was their lives. It could only be a matter of time before the whole structure came crumbling down. But unlike Lola, she could never say that out loud.

“Whatever the case,” Lola went on, “it’s his problem, Scarlett. It’s good that you care so much, but you have to lead your own life. I mean, you have your own problems. And you have a guest to take care of.”

Lola was right, but the reminder still wasn’t very welcome. She did have problems, like the weeks of nothing that spread out in front of her, the lack of money, of general life. At least Spencer had a goal, even if it was kind of a hard one to reach.

Come to think of it, maybe she did have an unreachable goal of her own.

She opened her computer again, where her imaginary Eric was waiting for her, looking at her again like he had at the table. Something had happened there, something that wasn’t imaginary. And if that had happened…well, anything could.

“Maybe this time,” Scarlett said. “Maybe things will work out.”

“Anything is possible,” Lola replied. “But honestly, it would kind of take a miracle.”

THE SHORT ARM OF THE LAW

The next morning, Mrs. Amberson was dressed in her yoga clothes and smoking on her ledge when Scarlett knocked on the door of the Empire Suite.

“Forget that for now,” she said, as Scarlett set down a pile of fresh sheets and towels on the dressing table. “You and I are going somewhere!”

“We are?” Scarlett said, looking down at her T-shirt and wrinkled shorts.

“I need to get reacquainted with the city,” she said. “It’s been a good twen…while since I’ve lived here. Do you even know what New York was like in the seventies and eighties? This Disneyland that you live in is not the New York I had to deal with. You didn’t ride the subway after ten at night unless you had a deep desire to get mugged at knifepoint. Times Square was porn central. It was a genuinely frightening place.”