"I don't want it," Rachel said, raising her eyes to me. The gratitude I had expected to see in them was nowhere in evidence. It had been replaced by…I wasn't sure what. I felt a stab of disappointment. I realized that I liked Rachel and wanted her to like me back. This filled me with surprise. For five years, ever since my wife, Deborah, died in the gas chambers, I had felt nothing for any woman. Not emotionally and not physically. It was as if this particular passion that had once burned brightly within me had guttered out and not even embers remained of it. Only now I felt glimmerings of that dormant emotion, mixed with a touch of shame, as if I had already betrayed the memory of my wife.

"How could you?" Rachel asked.

I didn't understand. "How could I what?"

"Do that. To him. You broke his hand."

I was beginning to get it. "I had to do it."

"No, you didn't. He'd already put down the knife. He was about to leave. And you just…you just attacked him."

Now I recognized what her eyes held. It was horror, disgust, perhaps even hatred for me.

"If he had gone out of here unharmed," I said, "by tomorrow his mind would have begun painting a different picture of this night. He would have started thinking that he had been too quick to leave, that he could have gotten his way if he'd stuck around. He would have blamed Max or found some other excuse. He would have come back. Maybe not this week or the next. Maybe it would have taken him a month. But he would have been back here. Now he won't, and you know why?"

I waited, but she didn't respond. She just glared at me with those scornful eyes, as if I were something that needed to be kept at arm's length, something dangerous.

"He won't be able to forget the pain, that's why. His hand will heal, his fingers will mend, but the pain will live on in his mind. He won't risk revisiting it. He'll stay away."

"You don't know that," she said, tears springing from her eyes and running down her cheeks. "You're guessing. You're making excuses for what you did."

"I told you that this is what it would take to solve your problem. I told you I would need to hurt him. You agreed."

"I never agreed to this," she said, shaking her head. "Never to this. Know what I think? I think you enjoyed this. You enjoyed stomping on his hand."

I said nothing. What was there to say? Nothing that would change her mind. Nothing that would change the truth.

"I want you to go," she said, fairly spitting out the words. "Get out. I don't want the money. Take it with you and go."

I was still holding the money out to her. I made to lay it on the table. "I'll just leave it here—"