"Leonid."

"What, Katrina?"

"We have to talk."

I continued undressing.

"The last time you said that I didn't see you for eight months," I said.

"We have to talk about us."

"Can it wait till later or will you be gone when I get home?"

"It's nothing like that," she said. "I've noticed how distant you've been and I want to, to connect with you."

"Yeah. Sure. Let me go take care of this thing and either we'll talk when I get back, or tomorrow at the latest. Okay?"

She smiled and kissed my cheek tenderly. She had to lean over a bit because I'm two inches shorter than she.

I PUT ON THE dark-yellow suit and a white dress shirt. Since I was going out for such an important client I even cinched a burgundy tie around my neck. The man in the mirror looked to me like a bald, black-headed, fat grub that had spent the afternoon drying in the sun.

I was shorter than most men, and if you didn't see me naked you might have thought I was portly. But my size was from bone structure and muscles developed over nearly four decades working out at Gordo's Boxing Gym.

"HEY, DAD," TWILL CALLED as I was going out the front door of our eleventh-floor prewar apartment.

"Yeah, son?" I said on a sigh.

"Mardi Bitterman's back in town. Her and her sister."

Mardi was a year older than Twill. She and her sister had been molested by their father and I had to intervene when Twill got it in his head to murder the man.

"I thought they had moved to their mother's family in Ireland."

"Turns out that they weren't related," Twill said. "Her father bought Mardi from some pervert. Her sister, too. I don't know the whole story but they had to come home."

"Okay. So what do you want from me?" I was impatient, even with Twill. Maybe the fact that his relationship to me was the same as Mardi to her father cut at me a little.

"Mardi's taking care of her sister and she needs a job. She's eighteen and on her own, you know."