Nini squeezed her way over to them, followed by two of her students aged fifty or sixty that she taught Chinese folk music to—this was her side job. She told Hongmei in Chinese that the secret talker was getting upset and had said that if Nini didn’t stop harassing her, she’d get someone to deal with her. Nini saw Glen looking inquisitively at her and trotted out the expression she usually used to torment him—a lifted chin, rolled eyes.

As Nini began to leave with her overage students, she turned back to Glen. “You’re very naughty. You didn’t give me a dirty phone call last night!” To Glen’s blank stare, she laughed. “Look at him, useless! Doesn’t even know how to enjoy a joke!”

Hongmei cried out suddenly, “Nini, have you found a new apartment?”

“Still searching,” she called back.

Each time an affair ended, she had to change her address. Hongmei said she knew a good place with cheap rent. Nini wanted to know if she could have pets. Hongmei said to call and ask for herself, then blurted out the phone number. Before she’d finished speaking, she had the thought that she had indeed been secretly longing for a private nest and had been thinking of running away. That’s why she’d quietly remembered the number on the flyer. She glanced sideways at Glen. The five o’clock sun tinted his eyelashes gold, making them look extra long, flicking up more than usual. Now he had a child’s eyes. She thought, How on Earth could he know what this woman next to him was planning all day long? Then she thought, This woman noticed a housing ad and wants to leave him, but for whom? No, for what? Was she running into the unknown?

* * *

The reply had been sent the night before, the night Hongmei had been tipsy. The secret talker told her that she happened to know the layout of Hongmei’s apartment: bedroom, two studies, living room, bathroom . . . 2,000 square feet, a standard middle-class dwelling. (No need to be mysterious about it; there were floor plans at the Realtor’s office—you only had to go in and pretend you wanted to rent a place.)

She told Hongmei that the previous midnight she’d stood outside the building. Her eyes had climbed floor after floor until they reached the southeast-facing window on the sixteenth floor. She had been certain that the figure seated beside this brightly lit square was Hongmei. Sitting down on a bench, the secret talker had taken a small bottle of Courvoisier from her pocket.

At this point, Hongmei’s chair squeaked and she felt a shiver pass through her. She’d been drinking too at that moment!