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SPLAT.
I get out of bed and walk into the bathroom. I see my face in the mirror—except, of course, it’s not my face. I stare at it. For a minute I can’t remember my real face. It doesn’t help that I’m wearing somebody else’s right now. Especially somebody who doesn’t even really exist. So I stare into the mirror. I try to see Me in there somewhere. I can’t see it. I can’t remember it. I’m somebody else, and for a long minute it feels to me like I was always somebody else and I don’t know who Me is and maybe I never really existed at all except as a whole series of Somebody Else’s Faces.
It’s that stupid fucking memory.
It knocks me on the head every time.
I pull my eyes away from the mirror, splash water on my face—on his face. Because it still isn’t Me.
I straighten up from the sink and look in the mirror again. But this time I pull away and leave the bathroom. Dangerous things, mirrors. You have to watch out for them. If you’re not careful, you can get stuck in there. They hypnotize you, pull you in, take you away to a place where nothing is real, especially you. It’s hard to pull out again.
But I manage. I sit on the edge of the bed and think for a while. The clock said it was 3:35. In a few hours, things would start happening and I needed to be alert, ready for anything. But I was pretty sure I still couldn’t go to sleep.
I looked out the window. New York wasn’t asleep, either. It never sleeps. Just like the song says. Isn’t it nice when something lives up to its reputation?
I thought about going out, maybe heading across town on an aimless parkour jag. That usually cleared my head, washed out whatever ailed me. But this time? It felt too much like running from something.
So I sat on the edge of the bed. Just sat.
After a while I stretched out with my hands behind my head. I lay there and thought about what I had to do in the morning. I lay like that for a long time, just thinking about doing it, telling myself I’d be fine, I could do it, nothing to worry about. I kept telling myself all that, over and over, until I saw morning light out the window.
Then I got up and went out to do it.
CHAPTER
15
Please don’t be impressed,” Katrina told Randall as she led him up the rose-lined path and into the house. “Really, it’s just a house.”
“No, a house is someplace where people live,” Randall said, looking up at the glass-and-metal facade.
“Well, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “I mean, I live here.”
“Mm, no,” he said. “This is a castle. A place like this, I think you have to dwell.”
Katrina opened her mouth to protest that really, she wasn’t a princess—but just in time, she caught the expression on his face. It was the look of a man trying very hard to look serious while delivering the punch line to a joke he wasn’t sure his audience would get. “In that case,” she said somewhat primly, playing along, “I shall have to demand that you enter on your knees.”
“Ouch,” Randall said. “Very well, Your Grace.”
And as if they were wired to the same switch, they snorted with amusement in unison.
That was when Katrina knew they would get along very well. And over the next few hours nothing changed her mind about that. She took Randall through the whole cavernous house, and he took it all in, making notes on a small tablet, which he also used to take photos. And all along the way, they made small jokes together, discovering that they shared a slightly off-kilter, very whimsical sense of humor.
Katrina found that Randall was everything she had hoped when she first met him. Although he was thoroughly professional and very knowledgeable, he was also warm, human—and yes, damn it, he was charming. In the few hours they spent walking through the house and making preliminary plans, Katrina realized she had smiled more than she had in the previous six months.
And at the end of the day, Katrina watched him walk away down the path, thinking, I really like this guy. But a small nagging voice in the back of her head told her it had noticed the way she watched Randall climb into his car, her gaze lingering on his butt, and the little voice whispered, Just be careful you don’t like him a little too much.
Throughout the next few weeks, the feeling grew. Katrina told herself it was just a friendship, two souls who had a lot in common and liked each other. But when Michael came home on one of his rare visits between business trips, she couldn’t help comparing him with Randall. Her husband did not do well by comparison. Randall was so much more . . . well, nice. Pleasant. Fun to be with, charming, funny, attentive. And if she was honest with herself, he was a great deal more attractive, too.
Not that she would ever actually do anything about that. Even though she thought he might be having the same kind of feelings about her. She wasn’t an adolescent. She was full-grown and totally married, and as her grandfather had often said, she had made her bed and could bloody well lie down in it.
But every now and then, she would look at Randall and feel that small warm feeling in the pit of her stomach that seemed like something more than friendship. And even though she pushed it away, it always seemed to come back.
Nothing will ever happen with him, she told herself. It’s wrong, it’s adultery, and it just won’t happen.
But that didn’t stop her from thinking about it.
* * *
