This didn’t actually disturb her as much as seeing the black-and-white tarpaulin of her pictures grow on the floor beneath Rica’s chair. Among them was her husband’s sombre face, and his eyes — so grey-blue light, so much at odds with his jet-coloured hair — seemed to be gazing directly into hers. This isn’t the way to escape, he was saying.

She never wanted to believe Simon’s words at any moment when he was most in the right. That was the primary difficulty in their marriage: her refusal to see reason in the face of emotion, warring with his cool evaluation of the facts at hand. She would say, God damn it, Simon, don’t tell me how to feel, you don’t know how I feel…And she would weep the hardest with the greatest bitterness when she knew he was right.

As he was now, when he was fi fty-four miles away in Cambridge, studying a corpse and a set of X-rays, trying to decide with his usual dispassionate, clinical acuity what had been used to beat in a girl’s face.

So when, in evaluation of her work, Richie Rica said with a martyred sigh at the monumental waste of his time, “Okay, you got some talent. But you want the truth? These pictures wouldn’t sell shit if it was dipped in gold,” she wasn’t as offended as she might have been. It was only when he jockeyed his chair around prior to rising that her mild ember of irritation feathered into fl ame. For he slid his chair into the blanket of pictures he’d just created, and one of its legs perforated the lined face of Deborah’s father, sinking through his cheek and creating a fi s-sure from jaw to nose.

It wasn’t even the damage to the photograph that brought the heat to her face. If the truth be told, it was Rica’s saying, “Oh hell, I’m sorry. You can print another of the old guy, can’t you?” before he heaved himself to his feet.