Alex had to realize how Robin felt, yet he made no effort to change. And Robin put up with it. Love is blind and deaf and dumb . . . maybe she’d simply made a commitment and was smart enough to know it was damn near impossible to change anyone.

But now, she’d gone on that tour. And taken the dog. For some reason that felt wrong—the damn pooch. Alex was claiming to be okay, but that first day Milo’d dropped in, he’d looked really bad, and even now, he was different . . . distracted.

Something was off.

Or maybe not.

He’d poked a bit at Alex’s resistance. Playing shrink to the shrink and why the hell shouldn’t he? How could you have a real friendship when the therapy went only one way? But no luck. Alex talked the talk—openness, communication blah blah blah, but in his own articulate, empathetic, ever-so-disgustingly civilized way, the guy was pain-in-the-ass, dead-end immovable.

Now that he thought about it, had Alex ever been deterred? Milo couldn’t remember a single instance.

Alex did exactly what Alex wanted to do.

And Robin . . . Milo’d offered his smoothest reassurances. And he supposed he’d done a decent job of keeping Alex out of harm’s way. But there were limits.

Everyone stood alone.

He got up, poured himself a vodka and pink-grapefruit juice, rationalizing that the vitamin C counteracted the oxidation, but wondering how closely his liver resembled that medical journal photo Rick had shown him last month.

Erosion of hepatic tissue and replacement with fatty globules due to advanced cirrhosis.

Rick never pushed either, but Milo knew he wasn’t happy with the fresh bottle of Stoli in the freezer.

Switch channels: back to Alex.

Other people’s problems were so much more engaging.

He walked half a mile to a Budget Rent-a-Car on La Cienega and got himself a fresh blue Taurus. Driving east on Santa Monica, he crossed into Beverly Hills, then West Hollywood. Not much traffic past Doheny Drive, but at the West Hollywood border the boulevard had been narrowed to one lane in either direction and the few cars in sight were crawling.

West Hollywood, The City That Never Stopped Decorating, had been digging up the streets for years, plunging businesses into bankruptcy and accomplishing little Milo could see other than a yawning stretch of dirt piles and ditches. Last year, the ribbon had been cut on a spanking new West Hollywood fire station. One of those architectural fancies—peaks and troughs and gimcracks and weird-shaped windows. Cute, except the doors had proved too narrow for the fire engines to squeeze through, and the poles didn’t allow the firefighters to slide down. This year, West Hollywood had embarked on a sister-city deal with Havana. Milo doubted Fidel would approve of Boystown nightlife.