I missed you. I think about you all the time. I’m sorry. Kissing you feels so right. I think I’m ready now, finally, yes. If it wasn’t for your husband. Forget about him. It could be perfect. Maybe. We need him out of our lives. He already is, I’ve already moved on. What got into us? I don’t know. I’ve been in a fever about you for days, for weeks. Are we really going to try again? We can make it work this time, I know we can.

And the words are sincere, absolutely, as sincere as any words can be accompanied as they are with tossed socks and bra hooks coming unloose.

Her shoulder, her neck, the soft underside of her breast, so new and so familiar. The brush of her fingers across my tattoo, the smoothness of her thigh, the taste of her tongue, the delirium that leads to the sweetest step in the sweetest of dances. Because it’s not happening just in the present, it’s happening in the past and the future, too, and all three are suddenly pure and full of promise. The unzip, the pull down, the kiss of the calf, still taut and lovely, the bite, the laughter, the sigh, teeth clacking, hands gripping, an ecstasy over the horizon so distant and so close it leads to a burning-

And then, smack in the middle, after commitment but before consummation, the knock at the door, a knock so loud the walls shake.

3

The car was still there, Sims and Hanratty were still there.

“They came,” I said to her as I stared out the window, “to tell me that your husband was murdered.”

I didn’t turn around when I said it. Whatever registered on that lovely face, a reaction of staggering shock or something else, something more frightening, I didn’t yet want to see it. It was my legal training kicking in, I suppose. The sad truth about lawyers is that we are fantasists, we make up stories in our heads, stories we can weave for judge and jury, but we don’t want to know the reality. And what fantasy could ever be larger than lost love recklessly reclaimed?