“What did you say?”

“Your husband was murdered, Julia.”

“Where? How? Victor?”

“At the house,” I said. “Shot through the head.”

“Victor, stop it.”

“Not long before you showed up here,” I said.

“Stop it. Just stop it. Please.”

There was a quiet for a moment, and then a whispered “Oh, my God,” as if she had just put together the meaning of my words, followed by the sound of something falling, collapsing, a long, dangling rope dropping to the ground.

I supposed she would expect me to rush over and help her through it. I supposed she would expect me to act like a human being. But instead I stared out at the cops sitting in the car in front of my apartment building and I thought over a few things. Like how Julia had come back into my life just a few weeks before her husband was murdered. Like how it seemed almost too wrong to be a coincidence. It might all have been a slapstick twist of fate, sure, and every piano that falls out of a fifth-floor window has to land on some sap’s head, but if it wasn’t pure happenstance, then I was already in serious trouble.

I took another look at the cops in the car, then I pushed myself away from the window and walked over to her.

She was lying quietly on the floor, hands over her face, towels strewn about her naked body. Her jaw was shaking, her breasts were rising with each shallow breath. I stared at her for a moment and wondered what I was seeing. A devastated woman who had just lost her beloved husband? No, surely not that, or why would I be seeing her at all? A cold-blooded killer trying to use me as an alibi or, worse, a fall guy? At first take it added up just like that. But she was so lovely I couldn’t stop myself from hoping that she was something in between, and that hope itself was enough to allay for a moment the brutal doubts that had bound tight my emotions.