Only she wasn't. The condo was empty.

Then did she work for the property management company? Nobody from the firm had visited the property except the yard guys, and they had no employee who fit her description particularly well anyway.

A previous renter? A relative of a previous renter? An ex-spouse or former lover of a previous renter? A roommate or subletter of a previous renter?

The condos were fairly new. There had been only one renter before, a Pakistani family of four who had been waiting for their house to be built out in Oak Park. No roommates, no sublets, no ex-spouses or former lovers, and even if one of their relatives had looked like her, they'd never given anyone a key because the wife was home all day so who locked the doors?

The research had cost him about a thousand dollars in lawyer and private investigator fees and the result was zilch. She didn't exist. No woman could possibly have walked up to that door and turned a key in the lock and gone inside. He didn't see it, it didn't happen.

He sat in the parking lot for half an hour on Saturday, trying to figure out how he could have been wrong. And came at last to the obvious conclusion—he was one seriously lonely man. Conjuring hallucinatory images of a woman very much like his dead sister, just so he could imagine meeting her and talking to her and having somebody to build a life with. It was definitely time to start dating.

The trouble was he had no idea how to go about it. He'd been a witness of the singles scene at restaurant-bars like Rio Grande and Lone Star and T.G.I.Friday's, and it always looked so pathetic to him. Come here often? You look good, and I haven't even had a drink yet. Buy you a drink? Want to help me celebrate my promotion? I hope you just broke up with your boyfriend so I don't have to kill him. Did any of these lines actually work? And even if they did, what came of it? One-night stands? Quick torrid affairs? Did any of these deliberate encounters lead to something that cured loneliness instead of simply easing the symptoms for an hour or two? Quentin wasn't interested in meeting the kind of woman who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet women there.