These were brief items from the business section of the Times. Larner’s job seemed to be lobbying council members for Garvey and Bob’s development deals.

Caroline Cossack shunted to Achievement House soon after Janie Ingalls’s murder. Not the kind of kid Achievement House accepted but a few years later, the director was working for the Cossack family.

I’d be brightening Milo’s evening.

I got home and checked my phone machine. Still nothing from Robin.

Not like her.

Then I thought: Everything’s new, the rules have changed.

I realized I’d never gotten an itinerary of the tour. I hadn’t asked, and Robin hadn’t offered. No one’s fault, both of us caught up, everything moving so fast. The two of us tripping through the calisthenics of separation.

I went into my office, booted up the computer, found the Kill Famine Tour’s homepage. PR shots and cheerful hype, links to mail-order CD purchases, photo-streams of previous concerts. Finally, times and dates and venues. Eugene, Seattle, Vancouver, Denver, Albuquerque . . . everything subject to change.

I phoned the Vancouver arena. Got voice mail and entered a push-button maze to learn Our offices are closed . . . open tomorrow at 10 A.M.

Left out in the cold.

I’d never set out to exclude Robin from my life. Or had I? During all the time we’d spent together I’d kept my work to myself—kept her at arm’s length. Claiming confidentiality even when it didn’t apply. Telling myself it was for her good, she was an artist, gifted, sensitive, needed to be protected from the ugliness. Sometimes she’d learned what I’d been up to the hard way.

The night I’d blown it, she’d left the house for a recording studio, full of trust. The moment she was gone, I left for a meeting with a beautiful, crazy, dangerous young woman.

I’d screwed up royally, but hadn’t my intentions been noble? Blah blah blah.

Two tickets to Paris; pathetic. A sudden rush of memories took hold. Exactly what I’d worked hard at forgetting.

The other time we’d separated.

Ten years ago, nothing to do with my bad behavior. That had been all Robin, needing to find her own way, forge her own identity.

Lord, rephrased that way it sounded like a pop-psych cliché, and she deserved better.

I loved her, she loved me. So why wasn’t she calling?

Grow up, pal, it’s only been two days and you weren’t exactly Mr. Charming the last time she tried.

Had I failed some kind of test by letting her go too easily?

Ten years ago she’d come back but not before . . .

Don’t get into that.

But at that moment, I wanted nothing but punishment. Opened the box, let loose the furies.