He tossed the picture onto the tabletop and got up. So far, he hadn't found any sign of her being involved with another man.

He went to the small bathroom beside the kitchen. There was a shower curtain running around the inside of an old claw-foot tub, a pedestal sink facing a wall cabinet with a mirrored door, and a toilet. It was all ancient and battered, but built to withstand the average artillery assault-heavy porcelain, cast iron, a tile floor. What Mary had been able to make clean, she had. The rest was either chipped, cracked, or stained beyond the help of minor surgery. It was standard New York fare, and made him think back to his own bathroom as a boy, or at least the one he'd shared with the rest of the family. He'd hated that bathroom-the constant interruptions when he'd hoped to be alone, the presence of so many other people's personal items, from Kotex pads in the pail by the toilet, to mangled toothbrushes and mysterious smears of whoknew-what around the sink. And his mother used to leave her underwear hanging off the shower nozzle overnight, after washing it in the sink. Drove him nuts.

Not Mary, though. Here, nothing was out of place. That had driven him nuts, too.

He opened the cabinet door: aspirin, brush, comb, a headband to hold back her hair, cotton balls in a dish, a variety of lotions and creams, toothbrush and paste, a backup bar of soap, still in its wrapper.

And a birth control dispenser, its dated slots empty up to the day she died.

He held the plastic clamshell in his hand, reading the prescription on its cover. These were sometimes taken medicinally, he thought, not just for practical purposes. Other times, they were merely wishful thinking in pill form, and didn't actually indicate any active sexuality. Given the lack of romantic evidence elsewhere in the apartment, Willy was left to wonder.