Still gentle, not looking up, he moved his hand away and walked back toward the window. Talking to New York, he told the city, and its one other inhabitant, “I’m not a fucking pedophile. I loved you because you were you. You don’t think it destroyed me that you were a little girl?” He traced the New York skyline on the window with his finger. “Do you know where I’ve been for all this time?”

He waited for New York to answer, but Ruby piped up, instead: “No. I have wondered every night. It’s been the first thing I’ve asked myself every morning. It’s what I always thought about during sex with Scott or lovemaking with Sebastian. I used the thought as others count sheep, only it didn’t soothe me. Where have you been?”

He looked sideways at her. “Do you remember when you looked up at me and said, ‘Baby, I wanna fuck’?”

It sounded far more shocking coming out of his mouth than it had from hers as a little girl. She covered her ears but it didn’t stop her hearing him when he whispered, “I was inside the answer.”

“What are you talking about?” she hissed, moving her hands to cover her mouth, her words unmuffled by them.

He pulled a red pen from his pocket and drew her mouth over the back of her palm, pulling back as he spoke to admire his work.

“When you said that to me, you trapped me inside a sheet of glass. That’s what happens when a little girl says ‘fuck’ and knows what it means.”

She moved her hands, and her mouth, flesh and blood beneath them, was tinged blue. “My mother told me what it meant. Years before I met you.”

He sat down against the wall, legs crossed in lotus position, and tilted his head back. “You sort of look like Lila, you know.” Liev stared at her until she had to look away. When she looked back, he was gazing at the skyline.

Irritated by mention of his ex-girlfriend now as she had been then, she turned on her side, so they were both looking out the window. She tried to look at the same thing as him, but it was difficult to pinpoint in the dark. His voice trailed again, like a velvet ribbon rolled out from the corner.

“You never met Lila, I don’t think. But she had watched you sleep one night, after a dinner party at your parents’ house, before I was there. I told her how I felt about you and she said that she had only glanced at you, but she thought she understood. Lila’s dead now. She was strangled in the shower by a homeless artist she took home one night.”

“My father didn’t tell me. We don’t speak. I’m so sorry. You must really miss her.”

“I miss a lot of people.”