“Couple of years passed. Bakersfield. By then, I’d taken to keeping a little twenty-two stashed in the bedside cabinet. Not for him, for me. I figured he was going to give me some disease, he was going to strangle me some night, and I’d decided to put a bullet in my own brain first. One night he’d gone out drinking, probably visiting the local cathouse, who knows. Commotion downstairs at three in the morning. Seemed he’d forgotten his latchkey and was breaking in through a window. Roaring about killing someone. I figured he meant me. I said to myself, Dear me, here’s an intruder, whatever shall I do. Well, I went downstairs and shot him twice in the head, that’s what I did, right in that spot behind your left ear that’s supposed to kill instantly, dropped the gun, screamed for help, and that was that. Libertas.”

I looked around for something in which to knock the ash from the cigarette. My legs shook. Thorpe started forward and crossed the room, right past me, through the swinging door and into the room I supposed to be a kitchen. He came out a few seconds later, holding a saucer, which he set down on the crate next to me.

“Thanks,” I said. “The funny thing was, nobody ever questioned my story. I mean the imaginary intruder who broke the window and shot my husband and ran off. Not the sheriff or the townspeople. Certainly not the Randolphs, goodness no. I mean, you could almost smell the relief on them. They sent somebody to bring the body home, held a decent funeral at the family plot on Long Island. Just a terrible accident, everyone said, shook their heads. I guess they were grateful to me for solving their little problem, although they didn’t say a word to me afterward, not a word, as if I hadn’t existed. One of their lawyers came and offered me money, but I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. These terrible nightmares. I figured I needed a fresh start, fresh career, fresh place to live. And I went and asked my daddy for a job.”

“Christ in heaven,” said Thorpe. He hadn’t returned to his position at the doors, and instead stood right next to me, leaning against the crate by my side, so that the sleeve of his shirt brushed my elbow.

“Well? Some story, hmm?”

He pulled the cigarette from my fingers and dropped it in the saucer. Pretty saucer, Wedgwood maybe. Somehow I’d missed that part of girlhood in which you learned about china patterns. But this I knew. The blue eyes, the dark gold lashes, the skin like a cat’s tongue beneath my palms.

“Christ in heaven, what a miracle,” he said.