“Angela Mori was a beautiful woman,” Sara said, and there was something like envy in her voice. She and the dead woman were about the same age, from similar backgrounds, with high cheekbones and the look of privilege. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

“Let’s not talk about Angela.” I lowered my voice. There was a catch in it, the briefest stutter. “You’re a beautiful woman yourself, you know.”

“I’m alive, anyway. I have that going for me.”

She turned to look outside, down the hill through the jumble of telephone wires that looped over the gray streets toward the harbor. If you looked hard, you could see the sailboats small and white on the bay. It was a typical Marin County day, a little windy and blue with the sun shining hard off the water and cars glinting by on the road below.

“Jake,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

I circled behind her then and put my hand around her waist and placed my palm on her stomach, touching her white blouse. I kissed Sara's neck and felt her back arch toward me, and had for a moment the sensation of something shifting within my head, the blood rushing. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror. Sara's blonde hair, her small breasts and long legs. My own blue eyes, my black hair: longish, just graying, pulled back in a pony. I put my hand down into her skirt, her eyes closed—and in that moment I thought about my wife.

“What are we going to do?” Sara asked again.

Though she was not a naive woman, it was a naive question. Her eyes were still closed. The look on her face said she was moving towards some secret place within. We fell onto the bed. There was a delicious coolness about her body, a tautness. My thoughts drifted. My wife again. Our beautiful house out at the point . . . our beautiful things. . . .

Then I thought about Angela Mori, and the morgue photos I’d seen splayed across the desk of her husband’s attorney.

Sara and I had not undressed yet. She was in her office clothes, a skirt cut at the knees, a blouse that unbuttoned in the back. She ran her fingers on my collar, then down the length of my tie, touching my belt. Soon things between us grew feverish. I lifted her skirt. She clutched me tighter, excited. My tie was undone, and the end of it got tangled between us. I pulled the tie off and it snaked across her chest, and somehow it got wrapped around her wrist and my wrist, too.

“Your eyes,” she said to me, “they have a life of their own. The way they glimmer.”

“The window to the soul,” I joked.

“Do you believe in it?’

“What?”

“The soul.”

“Sometimes. Other times, I don’t know.”