Satisfied, he flips his phone shut. Then he drives to his fiancée’s condominium. She is wearing green silk pajamas, and she looks as smooth and beautiful as fresh plaster. She looks at him blankly, without interest, without surprise, without anything. She does not even comment on his battered face. In a flash of blackness, he shoves her to the ground and makes passionate, unpleasant love to her on the bleached oak floor of her entry hall.

Then, sitting naked on her distressed leather couch, her black portable phone pressed to his ear, he calls every contractor he knows. The most brutal, the most efficient, the most pragmatic, the most no-nonsense.

He makes appointments, sketches timelines, makes plans.

* * *

The first month, they clean.

Contractors tear out the old offices where Ryan was beaten, commenting on the drops of dried blood and the smell of spilt vodka.

The police find no squatter. They search the place thoroughly, come quickly to the conclusion that she has “moved on,” and happily wash their hands of the whole thing. Ryan, however, is not satisfied with this sanguine pronouncement. In fact, every now and again, Ryan is sure he sees Winnie’s lumpy figure out of the corner of his eye, rushing at him, the wood in her hand raised high. Her eyes are lit with hatred and anger.

But she is never really there, and the police can’t arrest someone they can’t see.

Ryan’s brutal and efficient men start to call him “twitchy,” for he is always involuntarily dodging blows.

* * *

After a month, the building is completely gutted and structural work can begin. It is then that Winnie really does reappear. Ryan is alone in a room one afternoon, looking at plans, when he smells honey and steel, sweet and fleeting.

He looks up, alarmed, expecting to see her bearing down on him with the wood. But she’s just standing, looking at him, her arms crossed behind her back. She seems to have lost weight. Her ass is smaller, and her legs seem skinnier. Her skin seems smoother.