Again she sucked in a breath, let it trickle out, then leaned her forehead against the door’s cracking paint, trembling as if someone had pulled the plug on her strength.

“You all right?” A quiet voice behind her, not threatening, but she whirled, heart thudding. “There something I could do?”

The young man from the apartment by the head of the stairs-he’d come down the hall to stand behind her. Only a boy, can’t be more than early twenties. He looked tired and worried, some of it about her. She remembered, or thought she did, that his friend worked as a male nurse and had a bad moment wondering if he’d seen the disease in her. But that was nonsense. Even she wouldn’t know about it if the photogram hadn’t shown lump shadows in her breast, if the probe hadn’t pronounced them malignant. She tried a tight smile, shook her head. “I was just remembering. When I was a little girl living on our farm in the house my great-grandfather built, we kept a butterknife by the back door. I learned to slip locks early.” She smiled again, more easily. “We locked that door when we went to town and opened it with that knife when we got back. No one’d even seen the key for fifty years. The farm was between a commune and a cult, you see, and no one ever bothered us.” She held up her key ring. “Triple locked,” she said. “Sometimes it gets me down.’

He nodded, seeming tired. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Well, anytime.”

She watched him go back to his apartment. He must have followed her up the stairs. She hadn’t noticed him, but she wasn’t in any state to notice anything that didn’t bite her. She twitched the key, finished its turns, dealt with the cheap lock the landlord had provided, pushed the door open and went inside, forgetting the boy before the door was shut behind her.