“You’ve never had a cat,” Farrell said. “I don’t remember you ever having pets at all.”

“Mushy isn’t really mine. He came with the house, sort of.” Her eyes opened a few inches from his own—neither brown nor quite black, but a questioning, elusive darkness that he associated with no one else. “Do you remember that I was counting?”

“What?” he said. “What counting?”

“In the car, writing on the window. One, two, three, four, like that. Remember?”

“No. I mean, I do now, because you tell me, but not really. Move that cat and come see me.”

Julie reached up suddenly and switched off the bed-lamp. Farrell’s retinas, long accustomed to hurry calls, did the best they could, filing away the high contrast of black hair slashing across a shoulder the color of weak tea, the small breast drawn almost flat by her movement, and the shadow of tendons in her armpit. He reached for her.

“Wait,” she said. “Listen, I have to tell you this in the dark. I was counting me. Counting my cycle. I was trying to figure if it would be safe for me to take you back to my room with me. You looked so bad.”

The white cat had fallen asleep, but he was still purring with each breath. There was no other sound in the room. Julie said, “It was a matter of a day, one way or the other. I remember that very clearly. You don’t remember anything?”

The lights of a car slid over the far wall and part of the ceiling of Farrell’s hotel room, making the bidet glow like a pearl and turning the half-empty suitcase at the foot of the bed into a raw grave. Beside him, across the snowdrift of the cat—Paris winters are dirty, the air gets sticky and old—Julie’s round, tumbly-soft Eskimo face came and went again, as Julie herself came and went up and down in the world; as he would learn to come and go lightly too, if he didn’t die, if he made it through this long, dirty winter. He said, “I was twenty-one years old, what did I know?”