Also by Allegra Huston

Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

A Stolen Summer

Allegra Huston

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017

Copyright © Allegra Huston 2017

First published with the title Say My Name in Great Britain in 2017

Lyrics to “Night Blooming Jasmine” by Sarah Gillespie

Copyright © Sarah Gillespie Music 2017

Allegra Huston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008203252

Version: 2018-10-30

For you, my battered angel

Contents

Cover

Also by Allegra Huston

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Acknowledgments

Topics for Discussion

Copyright

1

There, under a table heaped with china of the sort nobody uses anymore, she spots it, almost hidden behind random objects carrying price stickers faded by time. Daylight filters through grimy windows onto worn green velvet, golden wood. Strangely, the case is open—as if it’s hoping to be found.

It’s bigger than a violin, much smaller than a cello. It’s fat, squarer than most instruments of its kind, with an elongated neck, and—this is what draws Eve in—encrusted with vines. The fragile carvings seem greener. They were once painted, maybe.

Eve moves the piles of junk aside so that she can crawl under the table. Usually she wears jeans for these expeditions, but it’s a hot New York summer, so this morning she chose a thin dress, counting on the intricate print to disguise any smudges. It will rip easily, though, so she tucks up the sides into her underwear to keep it off the floor.

As she crouches down, the bones of her knees crack. Though she’s fit and strong, her forty-eight-year-old body is starting to show age. Her brown hair has almost no gray in it—good genes, her mother would have said—but soon she’ll have to decide whether to color it. She’s never seen the point of lying about her age and, being married, she’s less concerned about looking young than she might be if she were single. Still, the ugly milestone looms. She’s tied her hair in a ponytail and covered her head with a scarf to protect against cobwebs.

By profession, Eve is a garden designer. Her husband, Larry, makes enough as a product development manager for a pill-coating supplier to pharmaceutical companies to enable him to treat her little business as, basically, a hobby. This annoys her, but the truth is, she treats it that way too. Taking it more seriously would mean confronting Larry and claiming ownership of her time and priorities, which she is not prepared to do. The status quo feels fragile, although it also feels as lasting as mortal life allows. All that’s required is that she keep the delicate political balance, and doesn’t rock the boat or disturb the sleeping dogs. She’s gotten into the habit of not pushing any communication past the minimum required for practical matters and the appearance of enough closeness to assure her that their marriage is sound.

On weekends, guiltless and free, she searches out treasures for her friend Deborah’s antique shop. Larry doesn’t complain; she suspects he’s glad to have the house to himself. For her part, she’s glad to be away from it. The strange objects she finds ignite her imagination, conjuring up lives more exciting, and more terrifying, than the low-intensity safety of her own. Today she’s exploring a northerly part of New York City that, like a tidal pool left by successive immigrant waves, houses people from nations that may or may not still exist: Assyrians, Armenians, Macedonians, Baluchistanis. The alphabets in which the signs are written change block by block. Neighborhoods like this are her favorite hunting grounds.

On her hands and knees under the table, she tugs at the instrument in its case. It shifts with a jerk, leaving a hard outline of oily dust on the floor. Probably it hasn’t been moved in years. She lifts it up onto a tin chest, keeping her back to the storekeeper to disguise her interest.

The vines twine over the body of the instrument and up its neck, stretching out into the air. Though the delicacy of the carving is almost elfin, it has the strength of vines: blindly reaching, defying gravity. The tendrils are dotted with small flowers: jasmine, so accurately rendered that Eve identifies them instantly. A flap of velvet in the lid conceals a bow, held in place by ribbons. It, too, is twined with curling vines.

She wiggles her fingers into the gaps between the instrument and the velvet lining, prying it loose. A moth flies out into her face and disappears in the slanting shafts of light.

Holding it by the neck, she senses another shape. With spit and the hem of her dress, she cleans away the dust. There’s a pudgy, babyish face, the vines tightening their weave across its eyes. Cupid, blinded by love.

Eve pinches up dust from the floor to dirty the face again. She has learned not to improve the appearance of things until after the bargaining is done and the money has changed hands. Then she turns the instrument over.

The back is in splinters.

Eve touches her finger to the ragged shards of wood, longing to make this beautiful thing whole again. The damage must have been deliberate: an accident would have broken off the vines. What drove that person over the brink? Musician’s frustration? Rage at fate? Heartbreak? She can almost feel remnants of the emotion stuck to the gash, like specks of dried blood.

If she had it repaired, the cost would almost certainly be more than the instrument is worth. And even an expert might not be able to restore it completely. It could serve as a decorative item, but only if the gash stays hidden. Deborah won’t want it—she has a rule against broken things. Also, she feels more comfortable with things that have names, like bowls and vases and candlesticks. Passionless things that sit prettily in nice rooms. The history that this object bears on its back would freak her out.

Eve moves to return the instrument to its exile, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Now that she has touched it, she cannot push it back into the shadows.

It’s an extravagance, driving into Manhattan: the cost of parking; the idling crosstown traffic. But Eve needed her car for her expedition to the outer boroughs, and she is not ready to go home to New Jersey. She finds an expensive space in an elevator lot, and starts walking the eight blocks to the Public Library. She leaves the strange instrument, in its case, on the back seat beside a curly wrought-iron birdcage she picked up earlier.

“Eve? Eve Armanton?”

She looks around, unsure where this urgent voice is coming from. She has barely heard her maiden name since college.

“Eve! I can’t believe it!”

“Robert?”

Robert Burnett, her brother Bill’s best friend. And, beside him, a younger man who must be his son. The pair of them hit her like an optical illusion, a thirty-year warp in time: Robert now and Robert then, standing side by side on 34th Street. The son is, Eve realizes, even more beautiful than his father used to be, with thick black hair, a finely cut nose, and angled eyebrows over long, wide-set eyes. Age has dragged Robert’s once-fine jawline into jowls, and thinned his hair. The bright blue eyes that enthralled her when she was fifteen are murky, and there’s a sheen to his skin as if the cholesterol in his bloodstream is seeping through.

Back then, Robert reminded her of Tigger, with his bouncing energy and his recklessness. He and Bill were twenty-two: college roommates, party boys, the world at their feet. Everything seemed to come easily to Robert—but Bill saw shadows where Robert saw only the light. Robert’s wildness was pure exuberance; Bill, Eve sensed with a teenager’s unspeakable anxiety, was daring fate, as if hurrying up the tragedy he knew would surely come. Eve has barely thought of Robert since her brother’s funeral. After Bill’s death, she cut off all connection with the elements of his life, terrified that the darkness that drove him to suicide might invade her too.

Robert moves more slowly now, his boisterousness reined in by years of office-bred decorum, the crazy Hawaiian shirts he used to wear replaced by a well-cut suit, pink shirt, and brightly patterned tie. She knows what he wants to do, and she will let him do it, for old times’ sake: sweep her up in a hug and spin her round and round until they both get dizzy. Bill used to do that when he saw Eve after a gap of weeks, and the fact that Bill did it became Robert’s permission, a fond mastery over his friend’s little sister, whose adoration he accepted, without comment or attention, as his due.

Robert’s arms lifting her feel as strong as they always did. Cars, pedestrians, storefronts whirl past in a circular blur. Eve scrambles for a reference point, as she was taught in childhood ballet class, and there it is, like a hook catching her searching eyes: the younger man’s gaze, his eyes a startling green, strobing as Robert whirls her around.

Finally, she feels concrete under her feet again. Robert keeps hold of her arm to prevent them both from falling. Bill used to love it when she fell over: a big brother’s affectionate cruelty.

“How long has it been?” Robert’s face is alight with the pleasure of finding her.

“Twenty-nine years. Almost.”

“The funeral.”

Eve nods. It took place in November. Leaves stripped from the trees, naked branches that made her think of her brother’s dead bones.

“You remember, we had a baby with us? Well, here he is. Mick, meet Eve.”

“Micajah,” he says, gently correcting his father. A name she’s never heard before. Mic-KAY-jah. She likes the roll of it.

He holds out his hand. “Eve,” he says.

She’s reluctant to touch him, as if she might be touching an electrified fence. As his fingers close around her hand, her nerves register the calluses on his fingertips. She drops her eyes. He’s wearing jeans and a loose blue shirt, the sleeves partly rolled. His feet, in hiker’s flip-flops, are sinewy, with long toes. She feels suddenly that she shouldn’t be looking at them, these body parts naked to her gaze.

“Eve’s brother taught me everything I know about music,” says Robert. “Which, granted, compared to you, Mick, isn’t all that much. My son, I want you to know, Eve, is a rock star.”

“I play in a band.” His voice is low, almost hoarse—nothing like Robert’s. His words are no more than an explanation to tone down his father’s boast.

“Inked the last clauses of the deal this morning.” Robert pats his son’s shoulder. “We’re celebrating with lunch. Join us, Eve! Whoever you’re meeting, stand him up!”

This is the Robert she knew: someone who embraced the world with such total disregard for the possibility of rejection that it couldn’t resist him. He was always on to the next thing, always excited, as forceful as a tornado. It fascinated and frightened her, the way the past just fell away behind him into a detritus of facts stripped of meaning. She used to wonder whether anything could really be precious to him.

In memory of Bill, Eve says yes to lunch.

“It’s an old Shaker name,” Micajah tells Eve as they walk, in response to her question. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was an architect, the first Micajah Burnett. The first I know of, anyway.”

“I visited a Shakertown in Kentucky once,” she says, “when I was driving my son to college. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.”

She remembers the elegant symmetry: twin staircases, twinned rooms, to keep the men and the women apart. And the sense of tranquility, which she imagined had always reigned there, since there were no marriages, no children, no sex.

Micajah has his father’s excellent manners; but, where Robert held chairs and doors the way a peacock holds his splayed tail, Micajah holds Eve’s chair for her in an offhand way, as if in casual rebellion against the carelessness of the world. Eve never agreed with the militant college feminists that such manners were insulting; she taught her own son to hold doors, though not just for women. Once she stood outside the door of the bank for several minutes as people went in and out, waiting for the eight-year-old Allan to realize she hadn’t followed his heedless rush toward the M&M dispenser inside.

“Looks like you were scrubbing floors this morning.”

She noticed Micajah registering the grubby hem of her dress and the smudges on her knees as she sat down. She’d tried to wipe them clean in the car, but the dirt had ground itself into her skin.

“I was dragging something out from under a table, in a junk shop in the Bronx. I was on my way to the library to research it when your father waylaid me.”

“That’s cool,” he says. “That you don’t care your knees are dirty.” The corners of his mouth turn down when he smiles, as if he’s keeping back some of his amusement for himself. “What was it?”

“A musical instrument. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Eve isn’t sure if he’s teasing her. Luckily, the instrument makes a convenient conversational shield. “It’s like a violin—strings and a bow—but squarer, with a really long neck.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing Mick plays,” says Robert. “Weird contraptions that don’t even have English names.”

There’s a sudden edge in his voice: annoyance, or jealousy? Praising Micajah, he was feeding his own ego, Eve realizes, and she dislikes being his audience: for the showing off and the putting down. She’s starting to wish, for more than one reason, that she hadn’t agreed to join them for lunch.

“My dad thinks I’m a terrorist,” Micajah says, unruffled. “Because I play music from places where the State Department doesn’t want you to go.”

His vibe is somewhere between bohemian and outlaw.

“Well, if it makes you millions, I won’t complain!” Robert’s laugh is a braying bark. Eve sees the couple at the nearest table stiffen and pretend to ignore him.

“Yeah, all that money,” says Micajah quietly. “I’m planning to spend it on gold-leaf underwear. Not ostentatious. Just for that coddled feeling.”

The corners of his mouth turn down. His eyes, mischievous, catch Eve’s. She feels a trickle of sweat run down her back, even though it’s cool inside the restaurant. The sports bra she chose for her hunting expedition feels like an implement of torture around her chest.

“You’re going to move out of that roach motel,” Robert says. “Buy something that’s going to appreciate.”

“I appreciate where I live now,” says Micajah. Then, to Eve: “Did you buy it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a musician?”

“No. But even if I was, it’s not playable. The back is smashed.”

“So why did you buy it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“And you couldn’t just leave it there.”

She feels transparent to his eyes.

“If it wasn’t broken, I probably couldn’t have afforded it,” she says. “It has this incredible carving, vines, twining all over it. I’m pretty sure it’s jasmine. It made me think of the secret gardens in children’s books. Or The Arabian Nights.”

“How the hell do you know it’s jasmine? It’s wood, for Chrissake.” That’s the spoiled-brat side of Robert: hating not being the center of Eve’s attention.

She reaches into her purse for a business card, and gives it to him. “I’m a garden designer now. I use jasmine a lot. It’s resilient, it lasts all summer, and it smells delicious when you sit outside in the evenings.”

Robert holds the card at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t believe what’s written on it. Eve had no particular interest in flowers back when he knew her. She gets the sense that he considers her change over the years as a kind of betrayal.

Micajah is glancing from his father to Eve, clearly wondering if they were once lovers. They weren’t. Eve is a little shocked by how much she cares that Micajah should know that. As the little sister, she had a Don’t touch sign plastered to her forehead. When Bill died, she went to the funeral with the guilty thought that maybe the extremity of emotion might propel them into each other’s arms. She hated herself for this callous disloyalty to her brother, allowing her desire to contaminate what should have been the purity of her grief. She didn’t know, before she got to the church, that Robert was married with a baby son.

The waiter arrives, a plate in each hand and the third balanced on his wrist. He gives Robert his steak, Eve her salad. Conscientiously, she ordered from the cheaper end of the menu.

“Saltimbocca,” the waiter says, setting Micajah’s plate on the table, twisting it to its most advantageous angle. “Jumps into the mouth. That’s what it means.” He’s flirting, helpless as an iron filing in Micajah’s magnetic field. Earlier, when he took their orders, Eve registered his agitation. She feels a pang of sympathy for him. Women used to be like that around Robert. She’d seen girls chase him down the street and force their phone numbers on him. He gloried in it with the laziness of a lion.

“Thanks, Josh,” Micajah says, remembering the waiter’s name from his spiel earlier, and meeting his eyes for a short moment before turning his attention back to Eve. Elegantly done, she thinks—a masculine gentleness his father never had.

“At least it’s not roses,” Micajah says.

What if the carved flowers had been roses? Would she have bought it? Maybe not. It was the jasmine—secretive, blooming in darkness—that seduced her.

“I hate roses,” he adds.

“Why?”

“Drag queens of the flower world.”

“Meaning what exactly?” his father chimes in. He looks from Eve to Micajah, Micajah to Eve, like a boxing referee before saying the word “Fight.”

“The whole sickening cultural orthodoxy of them,” Micajah says. “The fake valuation, like that ‘a diamond is forever’ crap. The environmental destruction of the factory rose farms, gobbling up the land in places like Kenya while the local people starve. It’s like their whole purpose in the world is to lie. I screwed around on you, darling, so here’s a bunch of roses. And that’s not even getting into the S&M of it. A symbol of love that makes your fingers bleed? Except, no, let’s pretend roses don’t have thorns, and hire slum kids to slice them off with razors.”

“He’s a hothead,” says Robert.

“I care,” says Micajah. It seems like an old battle between them.

“Do you really think it’s possible to have love without hurt?” Eve asks Micajah, then wishes she hadn’t.

“I don’t know,” says Micajah. “Is it possible to love deeply and choose not to feel the pain? Hell, it’s worth a try. Because if you don’t, what happens? You end up wrecking what’s beautiful.”

Like Bill. And like that unknown person who smashed the instrument but couldn’t bring himself to destroy it completely.

“Are you going to get it fixed?” Micajah asks Eve. “Or, you like broken things.”

It’s a statement, not a question. Again, she feels him looking straight into her heart. Flustered, she glances around the restaurant: the other diners chatting and laughing, the waiters moving competently about, the gerberas in vases on the tables.

“What were you doing in a junk shop in the Bronx, anyway?” asks Robert. “Looking for secondhand plants? I guess you found one!” That barking laugh again.

“Scouting for a friend’s antique shop. It’s what I do on weekends, sometimes. Now that my son’s grown. Allan.” Even after twenty-four years, she feels a warmth in saying his name. “He’s in Cambodia right now, taking a year off after pre-med, working for Smile Train.”

“What’s that?” asks Robert, though he doesn’t sound genuinely interested.

“A charity that fixes cleft palates on kids,” says Micajah. “That’s seriously cool,” he says to Eve. “You’re proud of him.”

“I am.”

“You should be proud of yourself too. You brought him up right.”

Flustered, she manages a half-smile in response. She’s glad she doesn’t know what to say, as she doesn’t trust her voice. Whatever words she’d find might come out as a squeak, or shaky, or have no sound at all.

“I’d never think you could have a grown son, if I didn’t know better,” says Robert with automatic chivalry.

Eve feels a warm, gentle pressure against her foot. As she looks to Micajah in surprise, the pressure vanishes. Imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

No, what? Eve wonders. No, don’t respond to him? No, you don’t look younger than your age? No, you do—or you don’t—but it doesn’t matter?

Eve takes a drink of water and smells muskiness on her skin. There’s a melting sensation at her core: her body is rushing ahead on a path she knows she should not follow. This boy—he’s a boy, she insists to herself, though she knows he must be twenty-eight or twenty-nine—is throwing her off her axis. In college, she lived for that feeling. Before today, she thought she’d outgrown it, and comforted herself in the dull succession of her days with the relief of knowing she would never feel that fizzing confusion again.

When she dares to look back at Micajah, the green gaze is like a wave rushing across the space between them to drench her, sweep her up, carry her away. Stop! she thinks. But she does not want it to end.

2

In the library, Eve forces herself to concentrate. The closest match she can find is called a viola d’amore, with a blindfolded cherub crowning its curving tip. But there is no other carving except the usual violin holes, and the blindfold is just a cloth. Plus, the shape of the viola d’amore’s body is different, and it has many more strings. She cannot find anything like those eerily lifelike vines.

As she drives home, Micajah’s words swirl around in Eve’s head. Has he ever felt that depth of love and loss? she wonders. She would like to know.

This is wrong, she says to herself. Then she overlays the first judgment with another one: that she is being old-fashioned and anti-feminist. Yes, she is married; but that doesn’t mean she should be caged and chaperoned like a Saudi wife. She is allowed to have male friends.

Still, the likelihood is that she will never see him again.

She makes an extra effort with dinner, buying halibut despite the expense. It was always Larry’s favorite, but they haven’t had it in the last year or so, since the day he came home from what he said was a company retreat and informed her that he’d found his totem animal. An “empowerment teacher” had led him on a vision quest, during which a wolf had appeared to him. The wolf, the guru told him, had come to guide him into the full expression of his self.

It was hard to imagine anyone less wolflike than Larry, but perhaps that was the point: the wolf’s qualities were what he needed. She could see that. A vague dissatisfaction had been gnawing at him. He’d followed the signposted corporate path to a solid management job, but a bitterness had crept into his accounts of the office, and she realized that his success felt so bloodless to him, so mediocre, that it was beginning to feel more like defeat. He began to buy uncharacteristic articles of clothing—pink socks, a leather bomber jacket—which disappeared after a few outings.

“I feel like I’m an illusion of myself,” he said to Eve once, in a rare moment of vulnerability. When she asked him what he meant, he couldn’t quite explain: he was blurred into a mass of people, and the idea that he, Larry, was an individual person, distinct in any way, was just a trick. It wasn’t a Matrix-like sci-fi horror vision; it didn’t apply to everybody. Just him, and people like him. He was losing his outline, or doubting if he had ever had any, seeping into a general sludge.

From the first hours they spent together, Eve had loved Larry’s surreal sense of humor, the way he imbued inanimate objects with motives and desires. It added a liveliness to his practical reliability. But he rarely found anything funny anymore. Eve felt a chill as she recognized, in that vision of human sludge, the imagination she’d once delighted in soured by despair.

He watched sports on TV as he always did, but his eyes became foggy, his hand held the beer bottle as awkwardly as an amateur actor holding a prop. He stopped seeing his old friends, and Eve doesn’t know if he’s made new ones. Their social life contracted, until Eve felt she could count her own friends on the fingers of one hand. Gradually, Larry moved into the spare bedroom: first his clothes, then his comb and nail clippers, and finally his nighttime self. The solidity, the sense of rational, practical certainty, that she was so strongly drawn to had abandoned him.

She has tried again and again to locate the moment in time when the slide started. But she cannot pin it down. His dissolution is like a creeping stain, reaching further and further into the past.

At first Eve welcomed Larry’s inner wolf, as she would have welcomed anything that promised to help him find his sense of himself again. Now she hates it and distrusts it. Once he was gentle and considerate; now he has become brusque, even deliberately rude, and proud of himself for every selfish action and bad-tempered snap at the world. When Allan was little, he used to beg Eve to read The Jungle Book to him over and over again; she remembers those wolves as dignified, protective, family-oriented. Larry’s feral inner self is a loner stalking through a kill-or-be-killed world. If only he’d read The Jungle Book, she thought.

Still, Larry was a good father. She loved to watch through the window as her menfolk played catch in the backyard, Larry contorting his body into bizarre shapes, Allan squealing with delight and trying to copy him. When Allan was a teenager, Larry took him on weekend fishing trips. Eve would ask what they did and Allan would always reply, “Nothing much.” But she saw what that undemanding companionship did for Allan: gave him a quiet confidence, an even keel.

“My default setting is happy,” Allan had reassured her when he opened his fifth rejection letter from medical school. She felt panicky, but he remained serenely sure that all would work out for the best. And it did.

The halibut is Eve’s attempt to remind Larry of their sweet days, before every dinner had to consist of red meat. But when she calls him to the table, he doesn’t come down for another ten minutes. By then the fish is dry and he eats it with an air of forbearance, as if he’s taking one for the team. He picks up an asparagus spear, watches it droop, and drops it back on his plate with distaste. It’s not my fault, Eve wants to scream at him, you’re the one who spoiled dinner.

“I’m sorry. It cooked too long,” she says, but then adds, “during the time before you came downstairs.”

“You could have given me some warning,” he says. “I was in the middle of something important.”

“Something for work?” she asks, hoping to jump-start the conversation.

“No.”

The instrument, hidden inside its case, sits on the sideboard behind Larry. Eve has prepared her tale of sleuthing through the flotsam of displaced nations and has been looking forward to telling it. Larry rarely asks about her day, and recently he has been sharing little of his own, so Eve has fallen into the habit of rehearsing their dinner-table conversation while she cooks. Now, however, she’s unwilling to offer up the instrument on the altar of forced companionship. If she did, she’d be exposing it to another blow—from Larry’s self-absorbed indifference. She feels an urge to protect it, like a lost child that she’s taken charge of until its mother is found.

“I’m going for a run,” he says, standing up before swallowing his last mouthful. He’s lost weight in the past year, and looks lean and slim. The fact that he’s healthier is the very thin silver lining.

He folds his napkin, drops a kiss on her cheek, and reaches into a cupboard for a stick of beef jerky on the way out. A year ago, he would have helped her clear up.

As she lies in bed that night, Eve realizes that not once during the lunch with Robert and Micajah did she mention her husband. She deliberately mentioned Allan, and she mentioned her business, wanting Robert and Micajah to see her as an independent woman and not just somebody’s wife. But does that mean she had to behave as if she was nobody’s wife? She wonders why neither of them asked—especially since she was wearing a wedding ring.

Half of that question is easy to answer. Robert didn’t care. He was delighted to see her only because she would be a mirror to reflect back to him his own glory as a father and a lawyer both. Any old or new acquaintance would have served.

And the other half?

Micajah didn’t care either. Which can have different meanings. One of which could be that, like her, he didn’t want to bring a husband into the space between them.

She tries to trace it back, to the first moment when she felt the beam of Micajah’s focus locking onto her. Before he brushed against her foot; before the talk of roses. When she caught him eying her dirty knees? No: out on the sidewalk when Robert whirled her round. It was she who sought his eyes, to stabilize herself. By the time she was standing on firm ground again, the connection was made.

Then, later, that shockingly intimate gaze. Could such a look have existed across the distance of a restaurant table? It was, she imagines now, how he would look at her if they were making love. It said, We are so joined, so complete, that the rest of the world does not exist. Meeting it was like riding a rodeo horse. When Micajah turned to his father and said something teasing, that was the eight-second buzzer. Whatever he said, whatever Robert replied, was white noise in her ears. That’s when she reached for her handbag, made an excuse about a just-remembered appointment, and left.

She has never seen that look in Larry’s eyes. He looked at her with love in their early years, a sparkle of pleasure at a quirk of speech or an idiosyncratic movement. But sex had always been basically a roll-on, roll-off deal. She’d thought that was how he wanted it. He’d glance at her quickly and look away, as if he was embarrassed or didn’t want to force her to look at him. Now she wonders if he didn’t dare to pause and pour his heart into hers, for fear she would close hers against him.

I might have, Eve realizes with a lurch. I was scared too.

It was the same fear that Larry felt: fear of being fully seen. She and Larry both wanted to be what the other wanted them to be; they hid their frailties, were ashamed of their faults. Maybe, she thinks, he thought that I loved an idea of him—a partial person, not the whole. He dreaded being seen—and so did I.

Now, after being held in the beam of Micajah’s steady gaze, she yearns for it. The very unlikeliness of his interest in her made pretense absurd.

Did she ever really, truly love Larry? Even yesterday, she would have answered yes, she did. Now, lying in bed, thinking about Micajah, the truth is that she doesn’t know.

I am being ridiculous, she tells herself, panicking. He touched my foot by accident. He probably looks at everyone that way. There’s no reason he would be interested in me.

Maybe he has a mother complex, she thinks. But that comes as a comfort, not a diagnosis—a possibility, not a problem. It wouldn’t be enough to make her say no.

And there she is, back again, like a compass needle dragged inescapably to the north.

The next day, Eve wakes with the spider on her face. It’s been there most mornings, for months now—a heavy darkness pressing on her brow, reaching sharp points into her eyes, her sinuses, cracking the corners of her mouth, making her head ache from the bones out.

Her breathing is shallow, though she’s so used to it that she hardly notices. Her stomach feels sour, as it usually does until she brushes her teeth. Her thighs are lead weights, and her feet are hot and uncomfortable. She sleeps with them outside the covers and often they’re cold, but there’s no way to warm them without the raging heat. Sometimes she fantasizes about chopping them off.

Many mornings, she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow, longing to drop back into unconsciousness. When that fails, she lies prone, one arm across her eyes, summoning the strength of will to greet the new day with optimism—what her mother used to call a good disposition. Eve dislikes people who feel sorry for themselves. She deals with her own burden of darkness by leaving it in her bed and, once upright, pretending firmly that it isn’t there.

Her heart thuds, too hard and too fast, as if it is trying to rev up the momentum to run away. It will calm down soon, as it always does; the thought of coffee helps. A latte, warm and bittersweet, soothes the jagged edges of her nerves. She will walk to the coffee shop and have somebody make one for her. She allows herself this luxury a couple of times a week, on days when she needs to feel cared for.

She resolves that today she will put all thoughts of Micajah from her mind. The name draws her back to that Shakertown and its naive, decorous purity. Since sex was forbidden, the sect grew only by conversion. No wonder it died out.

She hears Larry in the hallway, his door opening then shutting. They too sleep separately, but in resentful, repressed inequality rather than in equable, asexual peace. The bathroom Larry uses is not en suite; it also serves the room that Eve still thinks of as Allan’s. Though he keeps his bedroom door closed unless he’s actually walking through it, he leaves the bathroom door open. It’s a territorial power play that Eve accepts as a quid pro quo for his acceptance of the lower-status bedroom. She won’t go into the hallway until she hears his footsteps on the stairs.

The rasp of the blender drifts up from the kitchen. Larry is making his morning smoothie. Its ingredients are kept in a special drawer in the fridge into which nothing else is allowed, and which he has requested her not to open. Maybe he’s putting raw meat in it, she thinks, but the joke—if it is a joke—isn’t funny.

She’s hungry. Her stomach is clenching. Feeling treasonous for not wanting to see him or talk to him, she waits for the businesslike bang of the door. Then she will get up and revel in the empty house. He’s going to Arizona for work this week, and she’s looking forward to a few days of solitude.

Things are easier now that he has his own room. In the last years when they shared a bed, they would wake and turn away from each other if they weren’t turned away already. They would exchange cursory good mornings and she would ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” and dutifully she would have cereal, or eggs, or French toast, waiting for him when he came downstairs. The secret smoothies are a blessing too. Until she stopped doing it, she had no idea how much she resented starting her day by serving him.

She asked her son the same question, every day until he left home. She mulls it over as she lies in bed: how she has perpetuated the servitude by training the next generation to expect it. But isn’t that what a good mother does? When her mother said it to her, it was different: training by example, the flip side. She got breakfast for her father and her brother on the days when her mother lingered in bed.

Until the moment he left her, Eve’s mother served Eve’s father. She brought him a drink when he came home from work, she asked solicitously about his day, she never questioned that he did nothing to help with the cooking or the cleaning up, when she had had a far more stressful day with five children to care for than he could have had, in his well-appointed office with a well-appointed secretary. The details have changed, not the dynamics. The serving has become subtler: buying Christmas presents for Larry’s mother, praising him for taking any small share of the housework, making “Daddy time” the family priority. As the years tick by, Eve is starting to understand why in more brutal days old women were reviled, exiled, burned as witches: they’d stopped worshipping at the shrine. They could see that it was all just smoke and mirrors.

As Eve sits at the kitchen table, eating a slice of the apricot tart she made for dessert last night but didn’t serve, her phone pings. She gets few texts now that Allan is out of the country. Mostly they’re from Deborah. But this is too early for Deborah. She doesn’t open her store until noon so she can lie in bed late.

“Mornings are the best,” she said lasciviously once, enjoying Eve’s discomfort. “I get to spend time with my little friend. Actually, a really nice big friend! Poor Ted, he never measured up, but then what man does? No man around here, anyway. Once you go wired, you never get tired. You should try it, Eve. Stop being such a born-again virgin!” Deborah knows about Larry’s move into the guest room.

Eve has thought about it in a desultory way, but the idea of going to a sex shop is repellent. She’s afraid that if she searches online, ads for sex toys and hookup sites will haunt her screen forever. At times, she has wondered if she has any libido left. Menopause hasn’t really started to show yet, but maybe loss of interest in sex was the first sign.

The text is from a number she doesn’t recognize, with an area code she doesn’t recognize.

Hi, Eve. Send me a photo maybe I can help. M

Micajah.

For a crazy moment, her imagination spirals into naked selfies, compromised celebrities and politicians. She laughs out loud at herself. The tumultuous return of her libido, yesterday, is disturbing and intoxicating. She’s tired of feeling guilty over Larry. For now, she will put her guilt aside.

Micajah is simply offering to help. Or rather, it would be simple, if not for that “M”.

She knows she doesn’t actually need help. The instrument was an impulse buy, and she can easily absorb the sixty dollars it cost. She can stash it away and forget it. Allan can throw it in the garbage when she’s dead.

She goes to the dining room and opens the case. The choice is plain: save it or send it to its grave. Strange, how this inanimate object has the quality of a living creature. She picks it up with both hands and turns it over, where the splintered wood is pale and raw against the golden varnish that, in this clear light, has the mottled depth of centuries. She cannot trash this; it’s impossible. She wants the wound mended.

She sets it on the table where the light shows it best and snaps four photos: a wide shot, close-ups of the carved vines and the leaf-blinded Cupid, and the horrible gash in the back. As she waits for the whoosh that tells her the last text has gone, she fits the instrument back into its case. The vines seem to be reaching toward her, to pull her in, to twine her together with Micajah.

He phones twenty minutes later. She feels her heart pound as the number lights up her phone. She lets it ring, willing herself to calm down, but any longer and it will go to voicemail, so she swipes her finger quickly across the screen.

“I think I can help,” he says.

“You know someone who could fix it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me his number?”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“He’s . . . tricky.”

“Oh,” she says.

She feels like a stammering teenager, and hopes he can’t tell. She used to love to picture the physical connection between herself and Larry as they talked: the receiver held against her ear, the spiraling cord linking it to the phone, then the wires and cables threading through the miles to where Larry was, another spiraling cord, and the receiver touching his ear. But the electrons whizzing between her and Micajah leave no trace. She imagines an airy chain of particles and waves, with millions and billions of other chains whizzing through it, as insubstantial as magic.

“Meet me,” he says.

She’s on the verge of saying, Can’t you just give me his number? Instead, she says, “When?”

They settle on the following Thursday. He gives her an address.

Micajah’s persistence makes Eve feel special in a way she never has before. Larry’s judgment didn’t carry the authority of Micajah’s, even though Micajah is essentially a stranger. She was special to Larry when they were young, but she knew that didn’t make her objectively special. There was nothing extraordinary about her; it was just that she was a good fit for him. He was not extraordinary either, which appealed to her then. She suspected she had a streak of Bill’s wildness in her—she was drawn to stories of adventure, rebellious thoughts that she let loose into the air like helium balloons. When it killed him, she determined to kill it in herself.

For five days, she is walking on eggshells. She is certain that Micajah does not feel the same.

3

The club has no sign. It’s on the Upper East Side, a quiet part of Manhattan. The streets feature well-groomed older women walking very well-groomed small dogs, and occasional uniformed nannies pushing strollers built like mountain bikes. It is the middle of the day, so there are no visible men.

Two chic, beautiful girls sit behind an ornate desk.

“I’m meeting Micajah Burnett.”

“Ms. Armanton?”

“Yes.” It feels transgressive, admitting to her maiden name.

“He’s waiting for you in the library.”

The second girl presses a button. Eve hears a discreet buzz. A doorman opens an inner door. Eve has never been in a place like this: oozing comfort, patinated with money, every surface polished or faux-painted or plushly cushioned.

She spots Micajah in a corner, beneath the oak paneling, the glow of a lamp reflecting off his dark hair. He’s sitting in an armchair. A backgammon board lies open on a low table. He rises when he sees her.

“You came.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I figured maybe you said yes just to get me off the phone. You’re too polite to hang up on me.”

“And too polite not to turn up when I said I would, I guess.”

Her smile moves quickly beyond politeness, as if Micajah has lassoed it and pulled it close to him.

“What is this place? It’s quite something.”

“A club. Favored by older British rock stars, South American drug lords with surgically altered faces, and Russian oligarchs.”

“And you?”

“On special occasions.”

His clothes are scruffy in the way of movie stars caught by paparazzi in the park: jeans, T-shirt, creased cotton jacket. Flip-flops, as on the day they first met. Smooth, square toenails.

“Two sisters,” he says, following her eyeline. “You get used to getting pedicures.”

She can’t tell if he’s joking or not. To cover, she focuses on the backgammon board, the pieces set up ready to play on their eight sharp points. It is made of chocolate-colored leather, with points of alternating cream and ocher outlined in gold tooling. The pieces are discs of agate and white marble. It is a board for emperors and plutocrats. She runs her finger along a seam where two colors of leather meet, inset-sewn rather than appliquéd so that there is no obstruction to the pieces sliding across them.

“Dad told me you’re pretty good.”

“I was,” she says. “I haven’t played since my brother died.”

“That must have been tough for you. My dad . . .” He shrugs. We’re different from him, the silence says. No need to say more.

“I ordered tea,” he says, sitting down.

“Tea’s perfect.” People who have assignations do not drink tea. It is possible, and acceptable, to drink tea with the offspring of one’s friends.

He gives her a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. “This is the luthier I know,” he says. “The man who’d be able to fix your instrument. His name is Yann Logue. He’s eccentric. Don’t be put off by his manner, he’s not trying to be rude. It’s not personal.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to call him,” Eve says.

“The best way would be if we just took it to him,” says Micajah. “But you’ve got his number, in case you never want to see me again.”

She stashes it in her handbag, after a glance to make sure she can read his writing. It’s almost calligraphic, each letter formed with care. She wonders if he always writes like that.

“Sorry if I offended you the other day,” he says as he pours from a teapot perched on a side table. “Maybe you love roses.”

“I like climbing roses. But lots of people want formal rose gardens.”

“Status symbol?”

“I suppose. Or just lack of imagination.” She takes a sip of tea. “Did you know there’s a rose called Richard M. Nixon?”

“With the M?”

“Yes.”

“That’s actually revolting.”

He reaches behind his chair and brings out a bunch of spectacular, full-blown peonies, a wet paper towel wrapped around their stems.

“I don’t know if they’ll last long enough for you to get them home.”

“They’re far more beautiful than roses.”

A young man— Waiter? Bellboy? Concierge-in-training?—materializes with a vase half full of water. He places it on the side table and departs.

“Did you arrange that?” she asks Micajah.

“They’re good here. They think of everything.”

“You did.” He escapes the accusation rather than denying it, by picking up his dice cup and raising it toward her as if he’s making a toast.

“Shall we play?”

“Sure.” She picks up her own cup. He tips one die into his palm and rolls the other. A six. She does the same. A six also. She feels a twinge of embarrassment, as if she’s done it intentionally to flirt with him.

“Game on,” he says, turning the doubling cube to two.

The game comes back to her. She finds herself able to move her pieces without counting, to know instinctively when to risk getting hit and when to close ranks and protect. It’s a relief not to have to talk. She lets the rhythm of the game take her, the ebb and flow of the energy across the board, his hand reaching toward her when he moves his pieces and withdrawing as he collects his dice, her hand reaching toward him when it’s her turn. She finds herself staring at his long fingers as they slide the marble discs into place.

“Double you.”

He pushes the cube toward her. She looks into his eyes, green flecked with gold. She does not need to look at the board to know that she will say yes. After all, there’s nothing at stake.

She takes the cube with her left hand, and notices the glint of her wedding ring.

They play for nearly two hours. The board belongs to the hotel, he tells her; it’s why he invited her here. She asks about his band, and he tells her that their name is Blisskrieg, though they may change it to Metropolis because the label thinks Blisskrieg looks weird in print. They’ve been together for nine years, he says. It’s been a long road to what’s shaping up to be their overnight success. She’s pleased she can see, even in this softly lit room, the beginnings of lines around his eyes.

“What instrument do you play?” she asks.

“Lots of them. Fiddle mostly, and cello. Whatever gives the track an edge. Accordion sometimes. I just started learning theremin.”

“What’s a theremin? I’ve never heard of it.”

“A man named Léon Theremin invented it. It sounds like a zombie opera singer and it looks like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. You play it without touching it. It picks up the electrical energy from your hands.”

“So it’s like you’re playing the air?”

“Exactly!” He’s excited that she’s understood so quickly. She is too.

“I’d love to see that,” she says.

“I’ll show you,” he says. “Next time.”

So there will be a next time. It’s agreed.

She wins an eight-point game and he gives her a high-five. It feels like a stopping place. By tacit agreement, they don’t reset the pieces. He checks the time on his phone.

“Teatime’s over,” he says. “It’s cocktail hour.”

“I should be getting home,” she says. Though Larry is not due back from his business trip until tomorrow, and the cat can look after itself.

“Just one?”

He stands, and holds out his hand to her.

“Not here?”

“Kind of,” he says. “And kind of not.”

Again, that feeling of the horse under her—not bucking, but picking up speed. Yes, she should be going home, back to the safety of her home and the sanctity of her marriage vows. But there are reins this time; she can control it.

“All right,” she says. “One.”

He grabs a backpack from the floor and, after checking that nobody is watching, leads her to an unobtrusive door for staff only, ushering her through into a tiny space with another door blocking the way. He digs in a pocket, fishes out an ID card on a lanyard, and slides it through the reader.

“You work here?” Eve asks, happy that this extravagant venue now makes some kind of sense.

“Art deliveries,” he explains in a low voice, almost a whisper. “People actually live here. The kind of people who don’t want visitors to come inside their apartment, and don’t want to go outside. Too famous. Too wanted, in every sense of the word. They buy art, of course. Very expensive, large art, which somebody has to deliver. Which would be me.”

“So we’re sneaking in?”

Eve is the kind of person whose heart races when she sees a cop car, even if she isn’t speeding.

“Does it bother you?”

The thought of getting caught does, but she left caution behind when she left her house hours ago, and adrenaline is fueling her now. She feels like a kid sneaking into her parents’ bedroom when they’re out for the evening. She will discover something forbidden. She will learn secrets.

Micajah conducts her quickly through the service passageways to an elevator, and presses the button for the highest floor. Once the doors close, he speaks in a normal voice. “This”— he gestures with the ID card, —“is because I got a temp pass one time. Complicated installation piece, lots of in and out. The night shift was on duty when I left and they forgot to ask for it back. So later, I took it to this guy I know.”

“What kind of guy?”

“The kind of guy who can turn a day card into an all-access platinum wonderpass.” He grins at her. “The advantages of the frontier lifestyle. Brooklyn. Not the fancy part.”

When they emerge, he leads her down a scruffy corridor to a door marked Fire Exit. He pushes a horizontal bar to open it. Concrete stairs lead up to another door at the top.

“Close your eyes.”

Eve hears the click of the bar being pressed, and the squeak of hinges. She feels a faint breeze on her face. Micajah takes her hand lightly.

“Watch the step.”

Eve feels with her foot: it’s just a high lintel. She steps across it.

“Keep them closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

Micajah lets go of her hand. Behind her the door creaks closed. She hears the long rasp of a zipper, things being pulled from the backpack.

“You can open them now.”

They are on a wide expanse of roof, punctuated by little towers that enclose the various vents and chimneys of the building. The rooftop itself is paved with terracotta tiles. It’s the tallest building in the vicinity; all around them, the sky is a haze of pink.

Micajah squats next to a spread-out blanket. On it are a couple of miniature alcohol bottles, two conical glasses, and a rather battered cocktail shaker.

“I hope you like martinis.”

“I haven’t had a martini in years.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Eve regrets them. The decade since she’s drunk a martini makes her feel old. Even worse is the thought that martinis are what older people drink, and that must be why he is making her one.

“Retro chic,” he says. “Actually, it’s just because I’m showing off. I won an award for my martini when I was bartending in Berlin a while back. I brought a bottle of white wine too, if you’d like that better.”

“I’ll stick with the martini,” she says. “It goes with the sunset.”

“Lemon or olive?” he asks, holding up two Ziplock bags.

“Both.”

“Live wild,” he says, bending over the drinks. His shirt has come untucked and Eve longs to tuck it back in, to feel the knobs of his spine, the vertical ridges of muscle flanking it.

He hands her a glass. She takes a small sip. Alcohol will only dull her senses, which are on fire.

He leads her to the crenellated parapet that rings the roof. She knows the architectural style: Strawberry Hill Gothic, which was used in New York only occasionally, about a century after it was popular in England. She’s been studying classic English gardens for a project at the Trenton Country Club. Her mind races to those houses: Strawberry Hill, Cholmondeley Castle. Small square windowpanes. Banks of lavender. Ranunculus. Agapanthus. She distracts herself with the complicated words, steady things to hold on to.

“Blows your mind, if you let it.”

His voice brings her back. She’s never considered wonder to be her choice before. Okay, she thinks: I’ll let it. Right here, right now, I am on a rooftop with a crazily handsome young man who is holding my hand and showing me the view of Central Park as if he is Arthur and this is his kingdom.

Eve stares out at the expanse, a thousand colors of saturated green after a rainy spring. The sprawl of the Metropolitan Museum. The vast amounts of time and effort and imagination and ingenuity that created this city. The largesse that placed an enormous public park at its heart.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.

He sets his glass down on the parapet. It is a sign which, despite the decades since a man has flirted with her, she can read perfectly.

This is the time to run away, she thinks, to call it a mistake, to race back to home and safety. If I don’t, home will never feel safe again.

Then that’s the way it will be, she decides. Recklessness is giving her a rush more thrilling than anything she’s ever felt. And there’s a certainty about it, a total lack of fear. The horse is galloping, and she cannot fall off.

She sets her own glass down on the next crenellation over. Those glasses had better not fall, she thinks. They could kill someone.

Micajah’s mouth meets hers. His lips are soft and strong, pressing hers open then pulling away, an invitation to her mouth to push back against his. Instead, she draws back.

“You’re young enough to be my son,” she says.

“So?”

He covers her mouth again, his tongue reaching just the tip of hers, caressing her and then withdrawing, seeming to pull her tongue back along with his. She thinks: I am inside him. She has never thought that before, kissing a man. It feels delicious to follow him so closely. Her instincts flow with an ease she never knew was in her. The lead and the follow of their kissing is seamless. She feels their breath merge, the air flowing between them warmed by their bodies. He is breathing me in, she thinks. I am breathing him in. His DNA is in my veins.

His thumbs stroke her wide cheekbones, his fingers tangle in her hair, finding the edges of her ears, the tender spot where jaw meets neck, the soft indentation underneath her chin. Suddenly his lips leave hers and she feels them on the plate of bone in the center of her forehead, pressing it smooth, then tracing down the ridge of her nose, her upper lip, and dropping a chain of kisses around her mouth. She imagines a circlet of pearls that his kisses have left on her face.

She has never felt anything like this before. His lips, his tongue, his fingers, are caressing the fibers of her mind.

The stone is warm against her back, through the thin cotton of her shirt. She leans against it, freeing more of her energy to kiss him, to concentrate on the sensations of him kissing her.

What am I doing? she thinks. I am kissing this boy, this man, and soon I will be . . . fucking him? She’s only ever used that word to swear with—and even then, not very often. She and Larry didn’t fuck: nothing so gleeful and direct. They “had sex”—though not recently, not for years. When they were first married, less impersonally, they “made love”—though Eve had always felt rather uncomfortable with that phrase too. Did they really make anything together? They made a child, of course, but it was a long time between the making and the evidence of it. On that night, and every other night, Larry would climax and roll away, averting his eyes. Nothing remained that was made.

So, then, she thinks, slashing thoughts of Larry adrift, we will fuck. Maybe. It sounds good. She thinks, This should not be happening. This is not my world. But it is: his tongue is running down the cords of her neck, digging into the hollows of her collarbones. His hands are moving up under her shirt, searching for bare skin.

She trails her hand down his ribcage and back behind her, to push away from the wall and press up into him. She feels an edge, a corner—above it, empty space. The gap between the crenellations. A three-foot-wide shelf of stone.

She edges to the left, settles herself against the edge of the parapet, half sitting, and raises one knee, resting her foot against the wall. Her bent leg presses on the outside of his thigh. She puts her hands on his hips, feels the bones beneath the denim, and pulls him toward her. He stops.

Her heart flips. I don’t know what I’m doing, she thinks. I’ve gone too far.

He draws back just far enough that she can focus on his face, see its oval shape, the tousled dark hair, those beautiful lips, dark brows shadowing green eyes like mossy pools lit by rays of sun. His eyes search hers. Here I go, she thinks, and feels herself slipping in.

He picks her up and sets her on the wall. “Eve,” he says.

Her name sounds different in his voice, firm and definite. That is who I am, she thinks. Eve. The Eve who is here, hearing her name. From the mouth of this man who is about to fuck me. Under the sun and the wide sky, on a roof overlooking New York City.

She lets her sandals drop and curls the arches of her feet over the muscles of his calves.

His hands are under her skirt now, fingers tracing the lace edges of her underwear across the ridges of the tendons, then further down, further in. His thumbs press on her: a question. The energy inside her body jumps toward him.

“Yes,” she says.

The lowering sun is warm on her face, glinting on the top of his dark head. She presses her hands against the parapet to lift her weight as he draws her underwear down, and gives quick silent thanks to Macy’s for putting such high-end underwear on sale. She buries her gaze in the dark forest of his hair as she feels the fabric brush over her knees, across the bony points of her ankles, along the tops of her feet. Gone.

As he straightens up, he grins mischievously. The feeling of her own smile makes her think of running on the beach with Allan when he was four, chasing the waves.

“You are beautiful,” he says.

“So are you.”

“I’m young,” he says, dismissing it. “That’s all.”

His hands are under her shirt again. He presses on the lowest rib, then the one above it, moving from the outside to the center, then away, up and out to the far edge of the next rib. She longs to lean back and lie open to his hands, to let him play music on her, but there is nothing behind her: only the gap between the crenellations, thin air, thirty stories above the ground. She hooks her hands tight on his shoulders.

“You’re safe,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

He wraps one long arm around her back, cradling her, and with the other hand strokes her inner thigh, caressing it open. She closes her eyes and feels him touching her, finding how they fit together.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let go.”

Her head is full of sparks, all conscious thought disjointed. The vertigo of the empty air behind her, though she can’t see it; the blaze of him etching a path of fire inside her, the granite hard against her tailbone, the lean muscles of his shoulders moving under her grip, his hand cupping her breast, thumb on her nipple. I’m holding on for dear life, she thinks. If I let go, he will fuck me so hard I will fall and die.

He stops moving, buried deep inside her. “Look, Eve,” he says, “look where we are.”

She knows it’s there, the sheer drop behind her, but seeing it—the treetops, the cars, the horse-drawn carriages—and feeling Micajah’s arms holding her above the precipice sends a rush of blood to her head so fierce it makes her vision swim. She looks up, to the distant skyscrapers of Midtown gleaming pink against the indigo sky. She wonders if there’s anyone behind those windows watching them—admiring them, envying them.

He starts moving again, faster, branding the blaze of pleasure deeper into her. Her whole body is concentrated in that furrow, the intensity unbearable, until she cries out and it dissolves into a new delicious heat flooding through her, out to her hips, her legs, up to her heart, her breasts, her throat, the cavities of her face. She shudders in his arms. He runs his finger up her spine.

Eventually, she opens her eyes, finds his. “What about you?”

“What about me?” he says lightly.

“But . . . are you sure?”

“But what?” he says. He smooths her eyes closed and kisses her eyelids. “Fun, right?”

What can she say? Yes, it’s fun, it’s beyond fun, it’s not fun at all. It’s crazy serious. Her body tenses up, even while the honey of orgasm flows through her.

She drops down from the parapet and slips on her sandals. He sees her eyes go to her underwear, lying on the gritty surface of the roof. He shakes it clean and holds it for her.

“I can’t do this,” she says, stepping into her underwear, allowing him to pull it up into place.

“I know,” he says.

And again she sees that look in his eyes that dissolves the space between them.

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