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"You're a lunatic."

"And you're the woman who nearly climaxed while I described a homicide, so let's neither of us get grand about it." He puts the coat on, one arm, then carefully, the other. "And Manon. Everything I said about what I'd do to him, it's not just a fantasy."

I can't speak.

"Tonight won't be undone. I'm not asking about it and I'm not going to punish you for it. It happened, it's finished, and we don't speak of it again." He looks at me. "Go to him a second time and I'll kill him myself, exactly the way I said. I won't be sorry. I'll still marry you, and I'll be perfectly kind to you for the rest of your life."

"You said you wouldn't say his name."

"I haven't." Not once, all night. He hasn't. "Say it back to me."

"Get out."

"Say it back to me, Manon, or I'll take the coat off again."

"If I go to him," I say, "you'll kill him."

"Good girl."

At the door, he stops with his hand on the knob, and for one insane moment I think he's going to apologize.

"You're on at eleven," he says. "Eat something, take a shower, sleep till ten. There'll be a car."

Then he's gone, the door clicks closed, and I'm alone. What's worse, what my mind keeps thinking is how many times he told me to my face that all I had to do was say stop, and he'd have simply left.

I never said the word.

CHAPTER 12

Laszlo

I am getting married tomorrow, on Halloween, and I am standing in a locked room on the third floor of my house, staring at the boxes that hold the last documented seven years of Manon Valmont's life. I am nothing if not dedicated.

The room used to be a staff bedroom when I bought the house. Now it has no bed, the windows are shuttered, and the heat's been off in here for years. Paper doesn't like warmth and photographs don't like sunlight. My mother thinks I keep the tax records up here. She asked me once so I said, "Tax, Ma."

"Thieves," she replied. "All of them."

That was the end of it. Forty-one years married into this family and she knows exactly which doors to walk past. Besides, she's too busy worrying about my father to worry about my accounts.

I have a bag with me. A canvas one, the sort my men use for things that go into the incinerator downstairs, which is lit at seven every morning.

That was the plan. Tonight, the contents of this room stop existing.

Tomorrow afternoon she moves in, and you can't have your wife sleeping under a room full of stuff that’s all about her.

I have been standing here for twenty minutes and the bag is still empty.

Let me explain what's in these boxes, because I've never had to say it out loud and I'd like to hear how bad it sounds.

Reports, mostly. One a week for seven years, which is three hundred and sixty-odd envelopes, sent by a man I have never met in person and pay through a business I had set up just for this purpose so he doesn't know who he works for. They detail where she went, what time she got there, who she was with, what she bought, things like that. There are photographs too, because I asked for them.

Then there are other things. Her old hospital badge, for instance, which I'm holding. Laminated, one corner chewed soft because she used to run her thumb along it, a compulsive habit. She reported it lost and had to pay a fee for a new one. She even complained about those twenty dollars to a colleague in a stairwell. It's in one of the notebooks I used over the years. Sometimes, I did the sleuthing myself, just so I got to see her.

So she didn't lose that badge. I have it. That's the end of that story, and yes, I might be that far gone.

Seven years ago, my father's car went over the median on the Taconic at eighty miles an hour. They cut him out of it and flew him to New York Presbyterian. Four broken ribs, a punctured lung, a spleen the imaging said was fine but wasn't, and within hours, his blood pressure was tanking.

I did not leave the hospital for two days.