All right, so he hadn’t formally proposed to her on bended knee. They’d had a meeting of the minds, which was better.

Alfred had a feeling of impending doom. He had been sitting in his car for hours, on the street outside Penny’s apartment. He had parked in a spot he knew well and from where he had a good view of her bedroom window. The light inside her bedroom had never come on. Where was she? Even if she were out with that jerk boyfriend of hers, she should be home by now. Didn’t he have to work tomorrow? Alfred looked at his watch by the glow of a streetlight. Almost midnight.

Her car wasn’t there, either, parked in the apartment house lot where it should be. That meant she had driven somewhere to meet him. It wasn’t typical of her behavior. Ever since she had returned from her trip home to Fenwick, Connecticut, she had been acting differently.

What was the guy’s name? Gary something or other. He wasn’t worthy of holding her hand. Alfred was afraid that she was falling for him. Girls often fell for the bad guys. Alfred had actually been glad she had gone home. It meant that she couldn’t be serious about this Gary person-just as she hadn’t been serious about the dozens of other guys she had dated during the year since he had reconnected with her. Now his main source of information about her was cut off.

Every Sunday morning, Penny and her roommate used to go to a cafe on Pacific Coast Highway, eat breakfast, and talk. Alfred would sit in the booth diagonally across from them, so that he and Penny had their backs to each other. This cut down the possibility that she would recognize him. In addition, his beard, baseball cap, dark glasses, and the loose clothing he wore to hide his potbelly made him look much different than he had looked when they had graduated from high school six years before. The chances of her spotting him were minimal.