“Come,” she said. “Come inside.” She led him to the couch and helped him remove his shoes, leaving him to return with a pail of water foamy with bath salts, aloe vera, and mint leaves. Working quickly but with care, she rolled up his trouser legs, exposing his calves, which were round and firm like cantaloupes, and helped him settle his feet in the warmth.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, standing now. She lit two candles and turned off the lights. “I was out at the grocery when you called. I needed some ingredients for something I wanted to make you.”

“Thank you so much,” he said, as bands of muscle laid down their arms. “You’ve gone outside yourself tonight.”

She went to the kitchen, pulling his eyes like smudged ink on wet paper, and returned from the oven with a saucer of cookies, trailing behind her the scent of almonds.

She slipped a cookie between his lips, allowing her finger to linger there as he licked it clean of crumbs and butter.

“You are too sweet to me,” he said, floating off to sleep.

She had begun to massage his neck now.

“So you’ve finally gotten your cookie then.”

“Finally … after such a long time. Can I have the recipe?”

“No. I want you to come here whenever you need them.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what makes them special.”

“Oh do you?” she said, wrapping his hair around her fists like reins.

“Yes,” he said, languorously, lulled even more now by the scalp massage, by the ebb and flow of pulling. “Molasses.”

“How’d you know?” she asked. “I only used a drop.”

“A man can smell these things.”

He woke up on the couch, draped in bedding, blue-gray sheets like rain observed from a distance. The basin was gone, the plate cleared away.

As he rose he heard her breathing, sucking in and heaving out with concentrated effort as if inhaling and exhaling were not instinctive, but skills she’d learned from a teacher who’d told her to practice always—even in her sleep.

He followed the sound, and found her lying in bed, on her side, in a corner, with her spine against the wall, curled back into herself like a fist.

If he’d fallen asleep with her, would she be breathing easier? He felt his own breathing slowing down, changing its pitch, sounding like cassava being grated for a pone. And as he was swallowed by the rhythm of her back and forth, he sensed with his spirit and not his mind that maybe, if he just tried hard enough, he could breathe for her and lighten her slumber.

Pulling the door halfway shut, he took the phone to the kitchen and called the hotel to check his messages. There were three from Margaret. He called her and received good news.

Phil would be fine. The pills were an accident. And he’d be staying in New York for a little while because his audition would have to be rescheduled. This, she said, would give them time to know each other. The story was quite funny, she said, but it was best to hear Phil tell it.