From the television came the sound of a train whistle, long and plaintive.

A month of very good, two months of excellent, and then it all seemed to fall apart in the course of a disaster of a weekend.

He had come up to her door at a trot, his overnight bag bumping against his leg, calculating traffic and distance in his head and whether or not they would make the train, and what it would mean if they didn’t—his grandfather would hold it against him all weekend if they showed up late—and rapped on the door even as it was swinging open.

It wasn’t the first time the sight of Angie Mangiamele had robbed him of words. Angie asleep in the first light of day was enough to do it, Angie in a temper or scrubbing the sink or scowling at the pages of a book. He had it bad, no question about it, and so here they were, after weeks of discussion, on their way out to meet what was left of his father’s family, and when was the last time he had done that?

But the sight of Angie in the doorway made it clear that he had miscalculated, and badly.

She touched a tentative finger to her hair. The hair that had first caught his attention, lifting in the wind, twirling with a life force of its own, perpetually tangled, wild, enchanted hair. Sometime between this morning and now she had cut it all off into a short shag. And if that didn’t make a clear enough statement—even in his shock, he understood that she was trying to tell him something that he was too dense to have picked up on his own—she had dyed it blue, too.

If he hadn’t been running late, he told himself later, if he hadn’t been thinking about his grandfather, he would have handled it better. He would have said, Where’s your suitcase, or Let’s move, we’re going to miss the train, or even That’s a particularly stunning shade of cobalt, but none of those things had come to him. He had stood in front of her in the narrow hallway where—this is the way he would always remember it—he had had her up against the wall on more than one occasion, unable to stop long enough even to unlock the door—and opened his mouth to say the wrong thing.

“Oh, no.”

The tremble of her jaw gave it all away, though he didn’t realize it at that moment. It would be months before he could think about that afternoon with anything approaching objectivity, when it would finally occur to him that Angie had set him up. And by then it was too late.

John got up and left his office abruptly. The sound of Angie’s voice came from the TV speakers to follow him down the hall.

FOUR