Chance shrugged, carefully neutral. “I’ll meet you on the outside.” It was not quite a lie. He was not yet ready to tell her that he could walk with her without her knowledge, seeing her life, reading her mind.

She started back on the spiral path, silent of chatter at last, just one confused thought riding the surge of déjà vu.

I never did find out that woman’s name.

Names.

Names are important.

“You’re . . . Karen,” Miranda said, looking with wide-eyed anxiety at the two-meter-tall, red-haired, foreign young male. “Karen . . . Michael . . . Mair.”

“Yes, that’s me, Kieran, your new tenant,” he said. His cheerful expression soon faltered under Miranda’s silent, intense scrutiny. “Um . . . that’s all right, isn’t it?”

“One moment,” Miranda said. “Please don’t go away.” She shut the door gently in his face and went quickly back into the living room, where a woman sat before a low table bearing two cups of herbal tea and a sheaf of papers.

“Priya,” Miranda began in a tone of reproach. “That was my new tenant at the door.”

Priya blinked in surprise at the tone and the information. She opened her mouth to ask the natural question, but Miranda continued, still with that curious note of mild censure.

“In the short time that I spoke to my tenant, I realized a few things. First of all, I admit that the next time I ask you to do me a favor, I should probably be a little more detailed than, ‘I’m a busy woman; find me a tenant.’ Second, when you told me, ‘Your new tenant, Karen, will be coming by this afternoon,’ a gendered pronoun might have added some important information to that statement.”

“Ohhh,” said Priya, finally understanding. She burst out in a howl of laughter.

Miranda sighed, leaned against the wall, and waited. Finally the storm of hilarity subsided into a fit of sniggering and Priya was able to talk again, her voice shaky with incipient chuckles.

“Let’s look at the positive side of this. What did your last two tenants have in common?”

“They were female?” said Miranda sarcastically.

“And . . . ?”

Miranda scowled. “They were certifiably, dramatically insane,” she muttered in defeat.

“Exactly! Now, I can personally vouch for Mr. Mair. He is a nice, normal, balanced young man who works as a tour guide—not an actor, not a model, not a performer of any description. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a tenant who didn’t create extra work for you when you got home?”